by Julia Keller
“Two years later,” Ogden continued, “the Mayhew brothers finally came to New Earth. And then a year and a half ago, Kendall died of a drug overdose—but his Intercept lives on. It’s doing exactly what I had hoped it would—save New Earth. And it does it efficiently and cost-effectively. There’s no need for giant armies or expensive weapons. New Earth will never become like Old Earth.”
At that point, Violet realized, the storyteller part of Ogden Crowley was giving way to the president part, the part that made speeches: “It will never be subject to the violence of Old Earth,” he declared. “It will never fall victim to the terrible wars and the devastating plagues that come in the wake of wars. It will never sink beneath the weight of catastrophe. Its children will never see their limbs blasted away or their parents murdered or their dreams crushed. Here, everyone is safe.”
Safe.
Violet had heard her father use that word so many times. Tonight she decided to take a chance. She would do more than just nod.
“So is that always a good thing?” she said.
“What?”
“Safety. Is that always the goal? I mean, isn’t every great thing accomplished because somebody put something else ahead of safety? Like when you created New Earth. That wasn’t safe. You had to take risks.”
“Not the same.”
“Why not?”
“You’re a child, Violet. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I’m not a child. I’m sixteen years old. And I think that—”
“ENOUGH!” He thundered the word, turning it into the equivalent of a slammed door. This was the Ogden Crowley that the public knew best: the rigid, imperial leader who allowed no one to argue with him. The taskmaster who could never be wrong.
The conversation, she knew, was officially over. But she’d never storm out of the room. Only kids did that—and as she had just pointed out to him, she was not a kid. She was used to his temper. She loved him, no matter what.
“Okay,” Violet said. “I guess I’ll head off to bed. Good night.” She stood up. “Don’t worry, Dad. You’ll find the people who are trying to destroy the Intercept.” She didn’t want their quarrel to be the note they ended the evening on.
“Yes,” he said. But his voice remained cold. It was still the voice of the president of New Earth. Not the voice of her father. “And when we do—they’re going to be severely punished.” He had made a fist again. He perched it on the arm of his chair.
Violet bent down to kiss his cheek. She had to find some way to bring him back.
“Mom loved rainy nights like these,” she said. “Remember?”
A slight but perceptible shudder seemed to run through his body. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he was a different man; his face had relaxed. “Yes, I do remember that.”
“Hard to believe how long she’s been gone.”
“She’s not.”
“Not what?”
“Not gone. She’s here. Right here. I see her clearly—every time I look at you, sweetheart.”
Violet couldn’t speak for a moment. Her father was not a sentimental man. Most people would have called him the least sentimental person they had ever known. But she understood the deep well of feeling that lived inside him.
“I’m not like Mom,” she said quietly. “I couldn’t do what she did. Medical school, then going down to Old Earth, trying to help the people left there—no way. I’m not that strong.”
“You don’t know what you are yet. And one day, you’re going to make your mark. I’d bet on that.” He gave her a tired-looking wave. “Go to bed, sweetheart. Sleep well. The sound of the rain will help. It used to help me, when I was your age.”
But that was real rain, Dad, Violet thought. You still lived on Old Earth, and that was actual rain. Rain that came when it came. Not rain that comes from a computer program.
She wasn’t sure why that mattered, but somehow it did.
“Don’t stay up too late, Dad.” Violet walked to the doorway. She paused under the arch, turning back to him. “Some people have asked me how—how you and Mom ever got together and—I mean, she was—” She gave up. “I never know what to say.”
“It’s okay, sweetheart. I know why they’re curious. They can’t figure out why a beautiful, caring, sensitive woman like Lucretia would ever have agreed to share her life with a broken-down old grump like me. Right?”
“No, Dad, I don’t think they meant—”
“Don’t worry. You can’t hurt my feelings, Violet. I used to wonder the same thing myself.”
“And?”
“And I’m still wondering.”
He smiled. She loved to see his smile. He didn’t smile very often, and she missed it.
She missed a lot of things.
* * *
Hopeless, Violet thought. She sat up in bed and threw off the covers. Sleep would not be wooed tonight.
The rain had picked up a bit, peppering the dark window with its irregular beat. She reached for her console, tapped the small oval on the screen.
The first page of a journal jumped to life.
Field Notes from Old Earth / Lucretia Crowley M.D.
When Violet turned sixteen, this was her favorite gift. Her mother’s journal had been delivered via time delay into her console’s memory, along with a small note: Happy 16th birthday to my beloved daughter. Lucretia had set it up that way years before. In case anything ever happened to her, her father explained, she still wanted Violet to understand her work and why it mattered.
Violet was now old enough to appreciate the record of Lucretia’s medical practice, day by day—up to the day before she had collapsed with the first stage of Missip Fever.
The journal reminded Violet of who her mother really was: someone beloved by her and her father, yes, but also a diligent physician, relentless in her quest to relieve the suffering of Old Earth’s beleaguered citizens—even though that commitment had ended up taking her life.
When Violet couldn’t sleep, this was her ritual. She would pick a few entries at random and read. Lucretia was gone, but her journal was still here. Violet could almost hear her mother’s voice as she read her words, see her radiant face as she talked about her work. The work she described in her journal:
Administered vaccines to five babies in Old Earth Sector 208 today. Set the broken leg of an elderly man who had somehow dragged himself over here from Sector 194. Checked his lungs; emphysema clearly a possibility, but he refused to let me do any further tests. Cursed me while I put the cast on his leg and would not speak or answer questions. Adversity and hopelessness have warped people’s souls, even as weapons and constant warfare have warped their bodies.
Violet flipped pages forward with one finger on her console, watching them tick past. She closed her eyes, still flipping. When she opened them again, she would read whatever passage upon which she happened to alight.
She stopped. She looked down at the screen.
This was a portion of her mother’s journal she hadn’t read before. She took a drink of water from the cup on her bedside table.
A lot of people without any medical training do their best, but it’s not enough. Clearly. And these days, frankly, too many of them just want quick payment for switching out Intercept chips so that people can slip into New Earth under a false identity. They don’t understand the health risk.
That made Violet scowl. She recalled her mother talking about those kinds of people on Old Earth: greedy, unscrupulous. Preying on the desperate. Pretending to be volunteers offering medical care. Even the ones who had started out kind had evolved into tricky thieves full of false promises. Some claimed they could safely remove the chips from people hoping to sneak into New Earth. Lucretia Crowley had spent a lot of time treating the wounds of the poor souls left to bleed to death after someone had clumsily tried to gouge out a chip for a cash fee. Twice, Violet’s mother had had to amputate left arms that had become badly infected after the botched removal of an Interce
pt chip.
Old Earth is a harsh and terrifying world. The way people treat one another—it’s just so unbearably tragic. And the way the land has deteriorated—it’s sickening. Reprehensible. What happened to us? How did we let this happen to the Earth we love, to people we should care about?
Reading this now, all these years later, Violet ached for her mother. She could feel the force of her mother’s pain and disenchantment, even through the chilly, indifferent medium of the console screen. She wished she could argue with Lucretia’s conclusions. She wished she could say to her memory: “No, Mom, you were wrong—the world is not all bad, and people are better now. Kinder. If only you’d lived to see it.”
She couldn’t say that because it wasn’t true. Her mother had been right. The world was bleak and perilous and filled with despair. The only thing that saved it was the Intercept. At least that’s what Violet had grown up believing.
Now she picked another page at random. The date was December 8, 2288. Just a week before her mother began showing the terrible symptoms of Missip Fever.
She read.
She blinked.
She read the passage again, to make sure she hadn’t misunderstood it.
The words were so surprising to her, so unexpected, that her mind seemed to freeze in place.
She stared at the screen, reading her mother’s words over and over again:
I met an extraordinary young man today. He and his brother live on the streets down here in Old Earth, foraging for scraps like everyone else, but there is so much more to them than just the struggle for survival. I could see it right away. It’s something in their eyes, especially Kendall’s. It’s a hunger—but not for food. It’s a hunger for knowledge. He and his brother, Danny, asked me to help them.
It was a strange request. I don’t understand it. And I don’t feel comfortable doing something like this behind Ogden’s back.
Still, it only took me a few days to think about it and then to tell them yes. Yes, I’ll do it. I understand that if it doesn’t work out, the consequences could be dire—for them and for me, too. But I have to try. I have to.
So her mother had known Danny and Kendall Mayhew. And she had done something for them—something that troubled her. Did she know that Kendall was working on the Intercept? She didn’t say so in this journal passage.
Each time Lucretia returned from Old Earth, she and Violet’s father would sit down and talk about what she’d done down there, and the people she’d helped, the lives she’d saved, and he would say, once again, “Please don’t go down there again. Please. Violet and I need you.” Violet was there, too, eager to be in her mother’s presence again.
At that point Lucretia would give him a slow, sad smile, and she would say, “Darling, please listen. The person you love—the real me—well, that’s the person who has to keep going down to Old Earth. It’s so gray and depressing there, and the people are lost and hopeless and suffering. Diseases are getting out of control. If I don’t go to Old Earth from time to time and try to help, if I just stay up here and have a nice, easy life on New Earth with you and Violet—I won’t be the person you love. I will be a different person altogether. Do you understand?”
Before Ogden could answer, Lucretia would look over at Violet and add, “I want our girl to see what it’s like to care about something so much that you have to do it. You just have to. Because I want Violet to be like that, too. I want her to be strong and good. To think for herself. To go against the grain. I want her to work hard for the things she believes in. And to not let anybody stand in her way.”
But her mother had never told them about meeting Kendall and Danny Mayhew. They had clearly made a strong impression on her. And whatever it was she had done for them, she was troubled about not telling her husband about it.
What could it have been?
And why hadn’t Danny ever told her that he had met her mother?
The Intercept, Violet knew, was eavesdropping on her feelings, just like always. That irritated her. She didn’t want her emotion to be picked up, time-stamped, and stowed away. That emotion—a combination of wild surprise and passionate curiosity—was hers.
She’d heard about a little trick some people used to hide their real emotions from the Intercept. It only worked for a few seconds at a time. And it only worked now and again. But it was something.
The Intercept only dealt with the most prominent emotion at any given moment. If you were clever, you could sometimes slip another emotion in front of the one you didn’t want to get out, and no record would be made of the original feeling—only of the different one you’d willed yourself to have. She’d had friends who did this and swore it worked. She’d never tried it before, but now she did.
She thought about Danny.
She looked down at the crook of her left elbow. A small flash of blue winked under the skin.
Gotcha, she thought.
17
Death in the Rain
The next day Shura came by the lobby of Protocol Hall to meet Violet for lunch. Violet had decided to tell Shura what she’d discovered in her mother’s journal about Danny and Kendall.
But as they left the glass-walled monolith and headed for the food kiosks lining the plaza, Violet changed her mind. She still hadn’t decided what the journal entries meant. Before she told anyone, she first wanted to do what she always did when she faced a daunting problem: think about it. Her brain, Violet had found when dealing with past challenges, was her best ally.
“Burritos okay?” Shura said.
“Absolutely.”
Each kiosk featured a cuisine from a lost culture of Old Earth, a culture that had vanished in the terrible melting pot of global disaster: nations and their distinctive foods slid into one another like objects rolling together on a listing ship. The keen specificity of flavors, the details of preparation, had been lost in the amalgamation. When planning New Earth, Ogden Crowley had hired a cultural historian to research these long-forgotten foods and re-create them here. Thus Violet and her friends often ate tacos or pasta or chow mein, but only knew Mexico, Italy, and China as strange, ancient names in the history lectures on their consoles.
There was a long line in front of the kiosk. By the time they paid for their burritos, Violet had only about fifteen minutes left on her lunch break. Shura found an empty spot along the stone retaining wall that circled the plaza. Other people were perched along the wall, too, eating foods that had not been part of an actual family dinner for well over a century but had found a second life here on New Earth, like animals extinct in the wild that still manage to survive in zoos.
“You’ve heard, right?” Shura said. “There was another breach. After the one the other night. Just for a few seconds. It’s getting pretty scary, right? I mean—who are these people?”
“Yeah, I heard.” It was all anyone was talking about in Protocol Hall. And everywhere else, for that matter. No wonder her father wasn’t sleeping at night.
Lowering her voice, Shura said, “My mom thinks they must have the original source code for the Intercept.” She’d also looked carefully around the plaza before speaking, to make sure no one was eavesdropping. “That’s the only way they’d be able to get around it. Without the Intercept knowing they’re there.”
Violet had seen other people do that—give a quick, nervous look around their immediate surroundings. She wondered why. The entity that was actually spying on them—and doing it 100 percent of the time—had nothing to do with anyone sitting within earshot. You couldn’t lower your voice enough to escape the Intercept. The cleverest safeguards and best evasive maneuvers were irrelevant.
How, then, did the group calling itself the Rebels of Light pull it off?
“Any more threats to your mom?” Violet asked.
Shura nodded. “Yeah.” She set down her food. Violet could tell that she’d suddenly lost her taste for it. “She just got back from a trip to Old Earth to meet with a client,” Shura said. “I knew right away that somethin
g was wrong. She was—she was different. Sort of fidgety. She can’t settle down. And I noticed something else, too. She doesn’t look up anymore. At the sky.”
“Really.”
“Yeah. Her head’s pretty much always bent down. Looking at the ground. She’s sort of sad and upset, I guess, about the people who can’t come to New Earth. Who have to stay down there.”
“Do you ever wonder what it’s like?”
Shura gave her a sideways glance. “I don’t have to wonder. My mom tells me all about it. It’s awful. That’s why she tries to get more immigrants cleared to come up here.”
“Still,” Violet said. “I’d like to see it for myself. But my dad won’t budge.” She picked a string of lettuce out of her burrito. She buried it in her napkin. “Danny showed me a picture once of Old Earth. It wasn’t from one of the regular drone feeds.” She paused again. “It was the place where Kendall died.”
Shura’s eyes widened in surprise, so Violet quickly added, “He wanted me to know the truth about Old Earth. He thought I didn’t understand just how bad it really is down there. He wanted me to see.”
“So he made you look at—”
“It was after they’d removed the body. For some reason—a reason nobody’s ever figured out—Kendall went back to the same run-down neighborhood on Old Earth where they’d grown up. He bought some deckle. And then he OD’ed. He died in an alley, Shura. In the rain. In the cold. Next to a bunch of garbage cans. Kendall Mayhew—the inventor of the Intercept. One of the smartest guys who ever lived.
“You should hear Danny talk about that day,” Violet went on. “First he gets quiet, and then it’s like something is rising up inside him, this awful guilt. ‘Why did I let it happen?’ he always says. ‘Why wasn’t I there? How could I allow him to do that to himself?’ Oh, Shura. I try to help him, but there’s really nothing I can do.”