The Knowing

by Sharon Cameron

  I don’t think she’s remembering Sonia.

  When Beckett nods, telling me she’s gone, we leave the caching nook, and we’re almost running. Seeing one of the Knowing has my heart pounding, body tingling. We sprint through the short tunnel where Martina came out and up the stairwell that goes to the upland parks. We reach the seventh level, panting. Beckett checks beyond the door, and then we are in the long, silent corridor of the medical section.

  I duck left, into an empty room with beds ready to receive the sick people who never come; through an operating theater where I would have much rather had Michael, a room that to my Knowledge has never been used; and then right into supply rooms, and examining rooms, and storage rooms. Taking the back way through the medical section is less direct, but maybe a safer option than the long, straight corridor. Every time we come to a door, we pause for Beck to check our route, and when we come to the last one, I whisper, “The chemistry labs.”

  “It’s big,” Beck says, staring through the door. “Are you sure this is a lab?”

  “One of them. But I’m medicine. I’ve only been inside this one once.”

  Beckett shrugs. “Okay, go.”

  I push open the door. Only it doesn’t open. It’s locked. I should have thought of that. Beckett squats down, peering at the keyhole, then looks up.

  “Give me one of your hairpins.”

  I find one I can spare and pull it out, confused. Beckett plays with it, bends it, ruins it, then sticks it inside the lock and fiddles with it until something clicks. He grins up at me.

  “Sometimes it’s good to be the son of Dr. Sean Rodriguez,” he says, straightening up to tuck the bent pin back into my hair beneath the scarf.

  I have no idea what this means, but I want him to teach me how to do that. He’s already through the open door.

  “Lock it back up, Sam.”

  I do. “Are we alone?”

  “I have the alarm set.”

  I relax just a little. The room is big—huge—and I can see why Beckett asked if it was a lab. It looks like a field from the Outside. A potted field. Plants are everywhere, on tables, on the floor, all different sizes, shapes, and colors, some reaching for the ceiling. Lamps hang every few meters, shining a different light than what we normally use, and it’s warm. Almost hot. I can smell the growth. It doesn’t look like the kind of place where our wellness would be made.

  I’m wondering if I should go back into the medical section and try to find the bottles Reddix was filling, since Beckett is so good at opening locks, when he says, “Look.”

  He’s partway down a sort of crooked aisle, beneath a climbing amrita vine heavy with white berries, but what he’s examining is a tree, an infant one, growing in a pot on a table under a dome of clear glass. Only two leaves sprout from its stem, one bud hanging podlike between them.

  “It’s from the Cursed City,” I whisper. I would have recognized it even without memory. I certainly saw enough of them.

  Beckett asks, “Is everything in here used for medicine?”

  “I would think so … ” Except the amrita, I think. We drink that.

  Beckett looks around again. “Let’s check the next room.” I follow him to it. There’s no lock this time, and when he pushes the latch, only one light, a pale kind of flame, hangs from a ceiling wrapped in dusk. But the room is aglow, hundreds of luminescent petals.

  “Moonflowers,” I say. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

  “They look like faces,” Beckett say. “Sleeping faces … ”

  I turn to look at him. He actually looks a little sick. I squint my eyes. I guess they could look like that, the way the petals fold. “Are there no moonflowers on Earth?”

  “No. They couldn’t grow there.” He sounds relieved. “Not naturally.”

  “Why?”

  He takes my hand, weaving our way through the glow while he talks. “Because there’s only one moon, and it only lasts for a few hours before the sun rises again. And the sun only lasts for a few hours, until it’s dark again. Sometimes there’s no moon at all.”

  I try to imagine having dark and light on the same day, every day. I don’t see how that could even work. “Do you have stars?”

  “Yes.” Now he’s smiling at me. “We’ve definitely got stars. And we have oceans. Millions of square kilometers of water, and there are waves … It’s really beautiful.”

  I can’t picture what would be beautiful about that. But Beckett is thoughtful as we stop in front of the next door.

  “Do you miss it?” I ask. “Earth, I mean.”

  He stares down at the door latch. “A little.”

  “Would you go back?”

  He shakes his head, looks back at the room of glowing flowers. “Being here, it’s what so many people have dreamed of. And now I’m the first one to see it. That’s an amazing thing. But Earth … That will always be home.”

  His smiles, a little guilty, and I wonder what it must feel like to be thirty-nine trillion kilometers from everything you’ve ever known. For even the dark and light to be different. I touch his chin, and he kisses me very gently on the mouth, and this is a memory he is giving me, I think, to cling to when I have to stay, and send him back to the Outside.

  He opens his eyes. “And anyway, there are other compensations on this planet.”

  Now he’s teasing me, and I’m embarrassed. And he’s not.

  He has to use my hairpin again, and the lock on this door takes longer this time. But when it finally clicks, we steal through the door, lock it back, and now we’re in a proper lab, almost as big as the first room of plants, with worktables, tubes, and liquids distilling. Bright, steady light hangs down in glass jars from the ceiling. Glowworms. Thousands of them. Beckett shakes his head.

  “So all of this is for medicines that are never sent Outside, and that the Knowing never need?”

  It’s one of the things I plan to fix, if I can. “We’re alone?” I ask.

  “Alarm set,” Beckett says. “Tell me what we’re looking for.”

  “The liquid is clear, a little viscous, and there’s a smell … ” How do you describe a smell? “Not bad, but sharp. Like fresh air.”

  “New plan. If I find a clear liquid, you smell it.”

  I agree to that, and head to one side of the lab while Beckett goes to the other. I lean over to sniff a blue vial at random. There are many of these. It smells a little like amrita, but I would think amrita was made in the kitchens, not in the labs. Maybe the kitchens need some of what grows here. Maybe this is cookery rather than chemistry and we’re in the wrong lab.

  “Beck,” I say. He straightens from his examination of a coil of metal tubing. “Don’t move anything. They will remember.”

  He nods, and goes back to looking. And then I notice something odd across the room’s front wall. A tall, square box made of glass, almost as tall as me, similar to the dome over the tiny tree, only this glass is housing a vine. The vine twists around a young silvercurrant bush, slowly choking the life out of it, its own small berries hanging shriveled from the ends in haphazard clusters. Bitterblack.

  The rage inside me flames, blown by the sight of that black berry. One way or another, none of this will stand. Nita will be the last one, I think. No matter what I have to do.

  I step away from the bitterblack, wishing I Knew a safe way to destroy it, and find another box of clear glass, this one large and rectangular, stretching across a long table, its inside divided into three clear sections. I bend down to peer at it. Each section has two holes cut through the front, and the holes have … gloves. Like the smiths sometimes wear. But these gloves are long, sealed to the glass, so that someone could work inside the box without the risk of touching with their skin. The first section has small tools, a tiny scalpel, and one fat seed pod, cut open, and there are two glass bottles, very small, one with a minuscule amount of fine white powder.

  I study the box, seeing how the bottles can be passed into the middle section, sealed, washed, then passed into
the third section, where wafting flowers clean the air, waving their feelers against the glass. Four full vials of powder sit among them. Whatever they’re harvesting here, it must be poisonous. Dangerous. Even worse than the bitterblack.

  “Hey.”

  I jump. I was so engrossed I didn’t notice Beckett leaning down beside me. “A clean space,” he says, looking into the glass box. Then, “Someone just passed along the corridor, outside that door.” He nods toward the main door, just down the wall from the bitterblack.

  I straighten up, looking at the door in alarm.

  “They didn’t stop, and yes, the door is locked.”

  And suddenly I understand how a person can become dependent on technology. I was so sure Beckett’s glasses would know someone was coming I wasn’t thinking to be afraid.

  “Want to come smell this for me?” he asks.

  I go with him, between a row of tables, and at the end of a distiller is a jar of clear liquid, some of the smaller bottles Reddix was using sitting empty beside it. I nod at Beckett. I already Know. I can smell it. But now that I think of it, why was Reddix filling the bottles for our injections? And in a storage room? That should have been a chemist’s job.

  I peer at the clear, harmless-looking liquid. And what if this really is Knowing? What if all we’ve ever had to do was throw this away, dump it in the Torrens, and no more Council, no more Underneath and Outside. One people. And I would still have my memories.

  I could try to live with them. For Beckett. Which is easy to say in this moment, when I’m not killing Nita over and over again or listening to the crack of my brother’s bones. I will beg for mercy when that happens again. But maybe I could heal, like Grandpapa said. I could try. And I wouldn’t have to Forget him.

  Beckett is on his knees, staring through the glasses at the liquid in the jar.

  “What do you see?” I ask him. “Is it like a picture?”

  “No. Right now I can see the jar, but I can also see words about what’s inside. Amounts and percentages of everything that makes it what it is, and what those things can be used for. It’s still analyzing … ”

  I see the tiny movements of his eyes as he reads. He reads for a long time, hands splayed on the table. Then he looks up at me.

  “It’s vitamins,” he whispers. “Concentrated like you wouldn’t believe”—he looks at the jar again, like he wants to be sure—“but just vitamins. Not even anything that can’t be identified … ”

  And I feel an ache deep inside my chest. A shriveling kind of pain that in my mind looks like bitterblack.

  “I can’t believe it,” he says. He tents his fingers over his face, still staring at the jar. “I was so sure … ”

  So it is Forgetting that has to bring down the Council. No memories and no Beckett.

  No matter what, I will lose.

  And now so will he.

  I follow Samara through the empty corridors, feeling just about as hollow inside. I made her hope. I saw that in the lab, because I saw when her hope was gone. And now she gets to remember that, too. Feel it over and over again. Until she doesn’t have to anymore. And it’s then I decide that I am an idiot. A really selfish one. I saw her scream in the cave, watched her face tell me a story of pain. Just being in her own room was torture. And she was hoping not to Forget, to keep those memories, heal everyone, and keep her own pain, and that was because of me. If I really love her, I’ll help her Forget. I’ll do it even if it rips me in two.

  I think it might.

  She takes my hand, because that’s the way we go places now. We’re on one of the lowest levels, either the second or third, I think, when Sam turns right through a doorway. There’s a small set of stairs on the other side, leading to another door. I’m starting to get what a maze this city is.

  “The keys,” Sam whispers.

  I fish the iron ring out of my shirt, untie them from the lace at my collar. She puts a key to the lock, and then we’re inside some kind of room, a place that hasn’t been used in a long time from the smell, too dark to see. But before I can switch to night vision, the little green light in the corner of the lenses goes crazy. Pulsing at double, triple the speed that it was. Whatever the power source is, we’re getting close.

  She brings me across the dark room like she can see it, and I hear her putting a key to another door. Then we step into a void. Black, a solid floor beneath my feet, but with a huge sense of space. I’m switching to night vision when Samara whispers, barely a breath, “Is anyone here?”

  “No.” The little bit of echo I made is startling. It came from all directions, above and below.

  “Then make your light happen.”

  I turn on the light, my eyes adjust, and I just stand there, staggered. “You have got to be kidding me … ”

  Books. Thousands of them. An enormous, spiraling shaft of shelves, farther than I can see with my eyes in both directions. I’m standing on some kind of railed wooden walkway, and we make our way down it in a twisting slope, round and round. I can’t think of a crime Joanna Cho-Rodriguez wouldn’t commit to get ten minutes in here.

  “So why were the Archives closed?” I ask.

  “The Council says that books clutter our minds.”

  Which sounds like an excuse for controlling information. There’s another one of their creepy signs when we get to the bottom of the balcony, hanging over a doorway in the wall of the Archives shaft. “Knowing Is Our Weapon.” I don’t like the sound of that.

  “We have just over two bells to go through the books before you have to go back to the storage room,” Sam says. So I can go Outside, and leave her here. I don’t think so. “The help will be coming to the kitchens not long after that. I’ll get as many books into my head as I can.”

  I nod, and let the glasses make a picture for me, of a small room at the end of a short tunnel, with tables and chairs. Bookshelves. No people. But there is something close by. The green light in the corner of my eyes is blinking in a blur. The keys clink as Sam sorts through them, finding the right one. She puts the key to the lock and opens the door.

  A few steps down a tunnel and we’re in something like a reading room, one or two lamps lit on the tables, a small fire slumbering in a covered brazier, giving off heat from the center of a thin floor matting. Samara locks the door behind us and goes straight for the books, running down each shelf methodically, looking for the one she found before, about the Forgetting.

  But for once a room in New Canaan can’t hold my attention. The books aren’t even calling my name. It’s the door on the other side of the room I’m looking at. Or looking through. And what’s on the other side is not what I expected. Not in a million years.

  Technology is to be shunned. It is for the common people’s good. But for the people of knowledge, of memory, the builders of the Superior Earth, technology will only enhance our rule, and speed us to the pinnacle of our evolution …

  FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF JANIS ATAN

  I have the book with the description of the Forgetting, and another that was shelved beside it, but Beckett is staring at the other door as if it might explode, like the door in the Cursed City.

  “Sam,” he whispers. “Come here.” I hold the books to my chest, wend my way around the covered chairs to his side.

  “Have you ever been through this door?” he asks.

  “No. But it’s where Thorne Councilman came from.”

  “Is it? Okay. Stay with me.”

  I nod. We walk slowly to the door, and Beckett pushes it open. It isn’t even locked.

  Probably Beckett’s behavior should have been warning enough. Prepared me for something that would shock even him. But I’m not sure that anything could have prepared me for light so bright it hurts. For rock walls that have been washed a blinding white. For white chairs, oddly formed white tables. Even the floor is white. And as strange as that is, that’s where the familiarity ends. The stone beneath my feet is humming in a way I’ve never felt. In a way I can almost hear. Cabinets of a pale, sh
ining metal line one wall, blinking with tiny points of unnatural red and green, and there are eight thin, flat canvases, like pictures ready to be hung. Only these canvases have been painted with light. Bright, false light. Like Beckett’s technology.

  And then I understand. I am looking at technology. Here. In the city. Which is impossible. Except that it isn’t. I feel like I opened a door and walked onto the wrong planet. Memory tugs at me, insistent, trying to yank me down. I fight it, and whisper, “What are they?”

  “Other than what they seem to be, I’m not sure. This is a real hodgepodge … ” That made zero sense to me, but Beckett is concentrating on the square patches of light, just like when he saw the mural in the Forum, though this doesn’t seem like the same thing at all. He says, “Let’s wake them up and see what they say.”

  I step back. He made it sound like there’s something alive in here. He turns to look at me.

  “It’s all right,” he says, holding out a hand. “Come here and I’ll show you what they do.” I stand next to him, nervous. Then he takes off the glasses and stares at the nearest square of light.

  Nothing happens.

  “Okay,” he says, sliding the glasses back on. “Older than visual instruction.” Then he says, loudly, “Computer.”

  Nothing.

  “Command.”

  Instantly the painted lights begin to change, images springing up out of nowhere. There’s noise, music that isn’t real. My breath catches, and there’s a hard yank inside my mind. I’m falling, plummeting, and it takes everything I have to stop my descent, to climb back into the present. I hang on to the back of a bizarre white chair while Beckett walks a step or two forward. Three of the light squares have remained blank. He reaches out, puts a finger to one.

  It “wakes up,” little symbols flying upward on the background of four entwined letters. “NWSE.” He touches the next two, wakes them, and then sits hard in the chair next to mine, staring at the images.

  “This is from the first Centauri. The ship that brought you here. And it’s working. Oh, what if the database is intact … ” Then he sits back, looking at the room. “But the rest of this is too advanced. It’s the Centauri II. Has to be … ” He tents his fingers again, whispering, “What happened to them?”