I see Jill blink.
“… fulfilling the so-called directive of our ancestors. They were the ones to be afraid of, Adam said, because they were fanatics—judging, killing off any who questioned or didn’t measure up. He didn’t believe in any of it. He said Earth was a story, made up to keep the Outsiders out and the Knowing Underneath … ”
“Do you believe in Earth?” I ask. Jill nudges me with her knee.
“I think even the Knowing don’t know all there is to Know. Would you agree with that, young man?”
I tilt my head.
“Adam did, too. Mostly the boy didn’t like to be told how to think. But he said the way to shift things was simple. When the Knowing shut themselves in for Judgment, don’t let them out again. Block the doors until they agreed to our terms. The Outsiders had the power, he said, because the Knowing didn’t actually Know how to do anything, not with their hands, and the change would be better for everybody … ”
“We did what he said,” Annis interrupts. “Made pins for the gates from metal scraps, and for the door in the parks, blocked the light and ventilation shafts big enough to crawl through. He showed us … ”
“There were only about thirty of us,” says Cyrus, “and it was a white sunrise, after Judgment, when Adam said most of the Knowing would be distracting their minds, which means drunk … ”
I’m leaning forward so hard I’ve got the table pushed into my stomach. “What is a white sunrise?”
Cyrus and Annis look at me funny. Even Nathan is staring. Jill gives me another nudge with her knee.
“The white sunrise,” Cyrus says. “Every twelve years … ”
They mean the comet. “Right,” I say. “What happened to Adam?”
Annis jumps in again. “We did it, we blocked the gates. And he climbed on top of the gates, looking for the signal from the parks, and he just … He … ”
“Forgot,” Cyrus says. “We didn’t know then, that the Knowing could Forget … ”
“He panicked,” Annis whispers. “Went crazy. And he opened the gates. And the Knowing came out like they’d been waiting. Someone had betrayed us. They got everyone who was on the gates. Even the ones that ran first. Pulled them out of their houses. Even Ruth Smith’s daughter, who was just watching from the street … ”
Because they’ve got a camera on the gates, I think. I’ll bet Adam didn’t Know about that.
“We lost eight to the Forgetting that day,” says Cyrus.
“Wait,” I say. “Eight on the same day? Has it happened since?”
“Not that we know of,” replies Annis, “but we might not know … ”
“We lost eight to the Forgetting, and ten to the Knowing. Four blinded. Two disappeared. And six flogged until they died. Including Nita and Nathan’s father, who was on the gates … ”
Annis sits with a face of stone, but Nathan’s eyes are hot. Jill lets out a slow breath.
“… and Adam was taken Underneath,” Cyrus says. “And we saw the smoke rise from the mountain. We weren’t sure exactly what had happened to him until Nita started taking care of Samara.” Cyrus clears his throat. “But we learned something that day. That the Knowing can Forget, just like anybody, and that they didn’t want us to know about it … ”
I say, “Sam thinks the Council gave Adam bitterblack to cover up that he’d Forgotten. We were down there looking for whatever causes the Forgetting, trying to understand how it works”—another blown breath from Jill—“because she wants to use it to heal the Knowing. Sam thinks they’d want it, that they would overthrow the Council to stop living the way they are.”
“Adam did not seem healed to me, young man. But it’s not the Council. They could be reasoned with. It’s them, the fanatics, the head of their sect. The judge … ”
I remember Reddix beside the cliffs. Always everyone thinks this is about the Council …
“… Adam was Judged and condemned, for rebelling as much as Forgetting. And it’s Lian Archiva who’s been doing the condemning. She’s the judge. Adam told us. She’ll have to be the first one to go … ”
Sam’s mother? I run both my hands through my hair. And I sent Sam straight back into her arms. Sam thought her parents needed saving, and her mother turned around and condemned her, just like her brother before her. Did Lian Archiva really give her own son bitterblack? I’m sick in every way you could be. Stomach, head, heart, and mind.
“And how could we tell her?” Annis is saying. “When she can barely survive hearing Adam’s name? We just had to do something about it … ”
“And this time,” Cyrus goes on, “we have more on our side. The floggings have seen to that … ”
This time. I thought we must be getting to that. “What about Sam?” I interrupt.
“That’s where you can help us,” says Annis, fingers wrapped around her long-cold cup. Cyrus makes a noise and she says, “No, Dad! You said you trust him and we’ve given him the truth. It’s only fair to ask him to do the same. How many are you?”
For one second, I think she’s asking me how old I am. Then I realize she’s asking me how many are on the ship. Now Jill looks right at me, and I know what her eyes mean. Don’t say it. But we’re way past protocol. “We—”
“We have been asked not to discuss these things,” Jill breaks in. “And that’s all we can say. Please accept our apologies.”
I roll my eyes.
“Did you two run?” Cyrus asks. “Is that it?”
“Grandpapa,” says Nathan. He looks uncomfortable. “She said they can’t say. So just leave it … ”
“Look,” Cyrus says, “it’s dangerous for you here, but since you’re here, I’m thinking that means it’s more dangerous for you there. But we didn’t know there was anyone else … ”
“Do they know we’re here?” Annis asks.
“… and whatever the problems are, is there no way to talk about going in on this together? It’s a chance to build something new.”
Annis leans across the table. “How far is the colony?”
I look back and forth at the two of them. Another colony. They think there’s another colony on the planet.
“I’m sorry for the problems you’re having here,” Jill says. “But help is not something we’re able to provide. We extend our best wishes to the Outside.”
Showing sympathy, stating facts plainly, without giving personal details, using the vernacular, remaining positive. It’s straight out of the training files. And it’s stupid.
“Cyrus,” I say, “I’m from Earth.”
For the people of knowledge and memory have been given a gift, a tool, our most precious weapon. And it is called the Forgetting.
FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF JANIS ATAN
It’s interesting being dead.
I don’t Know how long I’ve been this way, but I’ve mapped almost all the rooms of my mind, following the thin tendrils of connecting thought when they ask for my attention. Letting them slide through my hands, picking up their ends. I hold the strings of my memories now, and instead of their yanking me, I can follow them, gently, and go to the room of my mind that I choose.
I visited Adam’s death, but only once, to think about what my mother had done, to listen to my father’s tears. Did he Know that she condemned and poisoned her own child? I think he did. And I’m sorry for him. And angry with him. But what had my brother done?
I followed the string of my thoughts, listened to Adam say, There is no Earth and There’s nothing wrong with the sun … And I watched, bouncing on the bed, while he put on his shoes for the Outside, telling me to lock my door during the celebrations. To open it only for him, no matter what I heard. That he would come for me, take me to see the special sunrise.
Something was going to happen that resting. Something that didn’t. And Adam was coming for me, to take me away. Take me Outside. Maybe he wasn’t all that different from me. Maybe that’s why she poisoned us both.
Controlling this memory does not mean I can control its pain.
So I run down the halls and find the room in my mind that is the cave with Beckett. I’m grieving in here, too, feeling the pain of losing Adam, but I am also being held, a hand on the back of my head, the warm smell of Beckett’s skin. Here, I can be comforted.
There are many different ways to be comforted.
Sometimes I visit the technology with Beckett, or let him tell me about countries beside the blanket on the resting room floor. Sometimes he’s floating in the clear water, shining a light jar on a lake bottom of crystals. Or I go to the storage room and kiss his face while he strokes my back and the scars on my arms.
Being dead is also lonely.
I’ve read most of the books now, including the medical journal discussing the Forgetting, though there wasn’t much more information than what I read before Thorne Councilman came. I run my fingers over the spines, lined up on the shelves of my mind, and then I notice a high shelf, in the corner, dark, and when I stretch, and reach, I find a book on it. This is what was in the hole in my mother’s wall. What my father told me to cache. I suppose I did. I take the book down, sit on the floor, and open it.
It’s a book of chemistry. I go through it slowly. There’s no hurry here, so I linger on explanations and equations longer than I need. Until I get to a chapter marked Transcribed from the writings of Janis Atan. Janis was also a chemist, it seems, and the first topic she discusses is how to safely extract a useful substance from the seed pod of a Forgetting tree. There’s a drawing included, a heavily budded branch, thick with leaves. And I have seen this before.
I follow my memories to the labs Underneath, the tiny tree beneath the dome, the sliced pod in the glass box, the “clean space,” the vials of white powder in the wafting flowers. And then I cross a hall in my mind and I am in the Cursed City, beside the ancient bathhouse, surrounded by the blowing trees, walking down a road choked with roots. My mind nudges, I push aside the familiar, heavy branch, and now I’m looking at the black-inked words written neatly on a page of the chemistry book.
The time to extract Forgetting, the page tells me, is during the sporing cycle, which under the correct conditions may be forced. In nature, this is timed to occur only once every twelve years, when the passing radiation of the planet’s comet excites the blooms …
White sunrise, I think. I’ve never seen a white sunrise. None of the Knowing have. And then I realize—of course I haven’t, because the Forgetting is coming from the bloom of the trees, sporing beneath the comet every twelve years. We’re not being shut in for Judgment. We’re hiding from the Forgetting.
I look at the dosage amounts. They are minuscule. Even the smallest exposure would make someone Forget, and the Cursed City is full of thousands, maybe millions of those dangerous buds. It must be a miasma of Forgetting when the sky goes white, a cloud of spores made to catch the wind and travel. And why wouldn’t they? I think of spores riding the breeze to New Canaan, and my brother, twelve years ago, Outside when he shouldn’t have been, on the exact wrong day, in the wrong spot, breathing air that wasn’t meant for his lungs.
And now, after I’m dead, I finally find the Knowing of how to Forget. In a book that was in my head all along. I wish I could tell Beckett.
I read on through the writings of Janis Atan. Her research on Forgetting was extensive. And she found a cure, a naturally occurring substance that would reverse the brain inflammation caused by the spores. But when she distilled, concentrated, enhanced this cure, then not only did it stop the Forgetting’s impediment of a subject’s memory, it temporarily stopped the brain’s natural impediments as well. The cure for Forgetting, she writes, created a condition called Knowing, where the subject is not actually capable of forgetting anything at all.
Janis Atan, I think, was incredibly brilliant. And incredibly evil. She didn’t make these discoveries in her head. There are names here. Notes. Results of experiments.
Anna, Planter’s daughter. Fifteen years old. Forced immunity. Three sessions of injected exposure with memories intact. Air exposure resulting in extreme cranial and spinal pain before an immediate rise in blood pressure, leading to death …
And on and on. Adults and children. Her words make the rooms of my mind feel dirty. I read how her experiments showed that some humans were born immune to Forgetting, and could be exposed to the tree spores without losing their memories. How this immunity could be created with a very slight, very controlled and regular exposure, coupled with the injected cure. How immunity from Forgetting meant—
There are pages missing here, three ragged edges, roughly torn, like missing teeth. I run a finger over them inside my mind, and then a memory is tugging, drawing me down, urging me to another room. I don’t want to go. I want to read about chemistry. I stay where I am, reveling in the fact that I can do it. That I am in control.
And here is the detailed process for making Knowing, in both an injectable and digestible form, a chemical recipe that I don’t have to search my mind to recognize. Amrita. Knowing, the notes say, is most effective when injected once, at a young age, followed by a small booster drunk at regular intervals. Like four times a year, I think, at our Changing of the Seasons.
I set down the book of chemistry and it dissolves away, disappearing like sugar sap in my tea. I concentrate, find the place in my memory that is my bedchamber, and go there, remembering the feel of the soft gold coverlet, staring up at the painted stars, thinking about what I’ve read.
I was not born with memory. None of the Knowing were. Beckett was right. We have been made to be this way. By my mother and her NWSE, “the guardians of memory, the architects of Knowing,” watching us lift our glasses to the sun and moon. And then suffer. No one has ever had to be Knowing, and no one has ever had to Forget. All we’ve ever had to do was not drink the amrita, and once every twelve years, go underground.
It is so unfair to have all this Knowing after you’re dead.
I think about Adam, Forgetting when he shouldn’t have, not just because he shouldn’t have been Outside, but because being full of that concentrated “cure” should have meant the spores would not affect him. But the answer is simple. Adam must have stopped drinking the amrita. What did he Know? Read? See? And when? It obviously wasn’t enough. And how did he get away with it? I’ll probably never Know.
I miss my brother. I wish I could have Known him, as more than a child. I think he must have been worse even than me, and that makes me smile. And then my smile dies. Mother could have cured him. But she didn’t. She killed him instead.
And then I sit up, startled. I felt a prick in my arm. Sharp and stinging. But the pain dulls fast. Like a wellness injection. Or the memory of an injection.
I lay my head back down on the shimmering gold, alone in my Knowing. And my memories. And I wonder if this is what forever is like.
Nathan follows me down to the cliff edge. The moons are almost ready to crest the mountain peaks, and there’s a paleness to the dark, though it’s still black in the shadows. I drop my pack and get out the gear. This is the fourth time I’ve done this climb to meet with Reddix, and I am sick of this wall of rock. But if he’ll bring me news of Sam, I’m going down. Even if it’s lies.
I don’t trust Reddix Physicianson any farther than I could throw him.
Nathan jumps a little when I shoot the hook into the rock, anchoring the ropes for the descent, but he doesn’t say anything. It took less time than I thought for the family to get over the shock of me being from Earth. I had a long talk with Cyrus, then another with Cyrus and Annis, and then we had an understanding. And a plan.
But Nathan, I think, hasn’t forgiven me for where I come from. Though he’s definitely forgiven Jill. He seems to think she’s some kind of martyr in this situation. And since his reasoning probably comes straight from her, I really don’t know what else I could expect.
“We could’ve had everything,” Jill said to me, statue-still on the edge of the bed while the others were still at the table, trying to figure out how two Earthlings
ended up in their resting room. I was pacing the room like a cat in a cage. “Money,” she went on, “house, your choice of the work you wanted, our names in the files. The two of us. And you threw it away, Beckett. Tossed it out like it was nothing … ”
I stopped pacing to look at her then. Really look at her. “You lied, Jill. Lied. To me. For years.”
She bit her lip. “I always thought, when the time came, that you’d … see reason … ”
“ ‘See reason’? You thought I’d agree to kidnapping an entire civilization? To flying back to Earth on a slave ship? What have I ever said, what part of me have you ever seen, that would make you think I would agree to that?”
“I thought you’d agree to saving the Earth, Beckett. And don’t pretend you haven’t been lying to me nonstop ever since you met her … ”
And that last part wasn’t an unfair point.
Nathan watches while I get the ropes ready. It’s the third time he’s made the trip with me, watching from the cliffs, so that if I don’t come back, someone will know what happened to me. It’s the option I would guess he’s hoping for.
But this time, when I’m done scanning the park, tucking the glasses back into my shirt, Nathan says, “What did you see?”
I step into the harness. “I looked at what I could without the darkness. Then I looked for sources of heat. Like a body. And there’s one standing over there, in the groves by the cliffs.” Right where he’s supposed to be.
“Can I see?” Nathan asks.
“Yes. I mean, I’d let you, but they’re set to only one person. So if you were touching them, looking through them, they wouldn’t work.”
Nathan thinks about this. “What if you held them, and I was only looking through, without touching?”
“I don’t know,” I say, cocking my head. “Here. Try it.”
I hold the glasses out to one side, keeping my skin touching, while Nathan leans forward, squinting his eyes. He leans back, looks over the lenses, and then back through them again.
The Knowing Page 31