Promissory Note

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  “Demonstrating that value is subjective,” Micah said flatly. “It’s past eight, Lauressa. Time to go home.”

  * * * * *

  Soil kept arriving on her doorstep. Most of the time it was left in anonymous green bags, the gift-giver delivering the soil when she was not at home. Laura was at a loss to know what to do with the soil, other than use it.

  “Of course you’re supposed to use it!” Keton told her. “That’s the point.”

  “Without acknowledging the gift? It seems…self-centered.”

  “You’ll think of what to do,” Tivoli said. “You always do. You’re kind and you’re sweet and that’s why everyone is tripping over themselves to give you a little bit back for what you do for them. Once Keton told one or two people about the first bag, they all lined up to do the same.”

  “So I should let them do this for me because it helps them?” she asked, bewildered.

  “Hell, yes,” Keton said firmly.

  Tivoli was proved correct a few days later. It was a rest day and Micah had insisted she stay home for the day, so Laura climbed up on to the roof, carrying the bags of soil one at a time. She began to lay out the boards to hold the soil in the small corner it would take up. The work was physically demanding, yet she was happy. She had taught herself to garden in order to pay for her house and she had found it to be such a peaceful occupation that her hours on the roof tending the plants had become a joy for her.

  Shortly after she had hauled the first of the bags of soil up to the roof, she was hailed from the floor. Laura looked over the edge curiously.

  There was an industrial spatula hovering in front of the house, low to ground because of the load it was carrying. Standing in front of it was a man with silver hair and bright eyes. He looked up at her and smiled. “Honeychild!”

  “Erron!” she cried.

  He waved toward the spatula and threw back the cover. “I have dirt for you!”

  * * * * *

  Once Laura had hugged him and kissed his cheek a dozen times and once she had wiped her cheeks, then run her fingers through the soil, Erron insisted on hot chocolate and they went inside while she set up two mugs to print.

  Erron settled at the counter with a sigh. “I’m getting to old for all this heavy stuff,” he said regretfully.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Laura told him. “You’re hale and hearty. All that living with your feet in dirt and your hands among green things. You said it yourself.”

  “I’m a hundred and ten next month, Laura,” he said gently. “Although I’m not about to stop working. I really would curl up and die if I wasn’t on the farm. I’m going to have to accept my limitations, though, and let the younger ones do the heavy lifting.”

  “Aren’t they supposed to be working for you, anyway?” she asked, teasing him gently. He was the leader of the institute as well as being the head of the farm itself. He had never rid himself of the need to nurture plants and watch them grow.

  It was only now he was here that Laura realized where she had learned her love of growing things, even though it had taken many years to emerge. “It’s because of you I started my garden,” she added gently.

  Erron gave her a small, warm smile. “Then I’ll consider my time not wasted. I heard about your troubles, honeychild.” He picked up her hair and brushed it behind her shoulder. “Now you’re mixed up with that bastard Thorn.”

  “He’s not a bad man,” she said quickly.

  “You say that of everyone,” Erron replied. “You haven’t got a mean bone in your body so you don’t recognize it in others. Thorn is a wretch, believe me.”

  “Is he, Erron? Really? What do you know about him?”

  Erron sipped from his mug thoughtfully. “You know, I don’t know as much as I thought. To be fair, it’s all rumors and gossip.”

  “Like the house he locked up?”

  “Yes, like that.”

  “He limps, Erron. Do you know why?”

  “Does he?” Erron put his mug down. “Interesting. What does his profile say?”

  “He vacuumed it out.”

  “Even more interesting.” He sipped thoughtfully, his eyes far away. Laura waited him out. Erron had memories that went a lot farther than Micah’s public profile. Even at his grand age, Erron would remember better than Laura could.

  “There was something. A long time ago. Twenty years or more now.” He took another sip. “A tankball accident.”

  “Tankball?” Laura shook her head. “He hates tankball. He wouldn’t watch a game on a screen, let alone go see one live.”

  “Maybe I remember it wrong then,” Erron said easily. “The details are hazy. I’m not even sure it was a game accident. Just something to do with tankball. The arena?” He blew out his breath and smiled at her. “Perhaps that’s enough to dig up the rest?”

  “Twenty years ago. Tankball. An incident.”

  Not tankball. That’s a different system altogether. Micah’s voice, very clear in her head. The memory was perfect. Laura didn’t have to grope for it at all. She gasped. “He steered me away from tankball.”

  Erron raised a brow.

  “I just spent three weeks researching major news events on the ship for the last one hundred years. He told me to stay away from tankball as that didn’t count.”

  Erron grinned and for a moment he looked very young, the way she remembered him from when she had first met him when she was a child and living in the Palatine herself. “That didn’t throw up alarms and caution lights for you? I would have zeroed in on tankball the moment he’d turned his back.”

  “I believe you would. Not all of us had the fortune to live with Jonah Solomon, Erron. I don’t think around corners the way you do.”

  “You think just fine, all the same,” Erron assured her. “How about we get that soil carted up to the roof?”

  Laura did most of the carrying. She wouldn’t let Erron do more than a load here and there and she kept her eye on him as he huffed and puffed. Lars, who lived in the house opposite hers, came out and helped, too.

  Both men were interested in what she was doing on the roof. “I need soil depth,” she explained, “to grow the bushes properly. So I have to dam back the soil with the boards, a section at a time. As I get more soil, I can move the boards out and plant more in the new sections. Erron’s load is going to fill up nearly a third of the roof.”

  Erron asked questions that showed he’d spent a lifetime growing things himself, including asking about her seeds and starters. “I might be able to snag a few seeds myself,” he said. “Would you like another run at a cocoa tree?” He looked up at the lights overhead. “You’re almost perfectly positioned for it and I know where I could get a seedling.”

  “I liked the strawberries you grew,” Lars added. “You should do more of those.”

  Lars was not a gardener at all. His skill and artistry emerged when he was building printer patterns for luxury items. However, his interest in her garden got Laura’s mind turning.

  Later that night, tired and incredibly happy with her day’s work, she added the photos she had taken of the developing garden to her profile on the Forum, with a few words about the work she was doing and a deeply heart-felt thank you to the anonymous people who had left bags of soil on her doorstep.

  The next evening, when she returned from the Aventine, there were six more bags of soil waiting for her.

  Chapter Seven

  It didn’t seem right to research about Micah himself using his own datariver and AI, so Laura only got to indulge her curiosity when she was home at night. Even then, the chores of setting up the garden kept her busy until late at night so it was only in the last few peaceful minutes of the day when she could comb through public records, looking for answers.

  She could find no incident involving tankball in the last twenty years. There were the usual push-and-shove fan melees, strident calls for the end of game and player bribery despite the lack of evidence that bribes had ever had an effect on a game that i
nvolved random chance. There was far more reporting about the tankball league’s sponsorship of captains and one interesting retrospective that pondered what life would be like on the ship if Jonah Solomon’s establishment of elections for captains had never happened.

  There was nothing about an event surrounding tankball, or the tankball arena.

  Laura would have given up looking for an answer at all, except for Erron’s hazy memory of an event that happened when she was still a teenager and blatantly not interested in tankball, or even tankball players. Her life had been taken up around that time with a far different and more personal crisis. Yet Erron remembered something and Micah had deliberately steered her away from looking into tankball incidences. Combined, that made it hard to shut down the search.

  There was something there. She just wasn’t looking in the right places.

  “What about looking in the Forum instead of the news archives?” Keton had suggested when she explained her lack of progress. “The older people, like Erron himself, have stuff going back decades that no one digs up anymore. There are the memorial profiles, too.”

  “People don’t have news on their profiles,” Laura said.

  “If they were there, they might have talked about it or mentioned it. Then you’d know something did happen.”

  “And you’d have a date to work from, too,” Tivoli added.

  Over the next week, Laura started going back into the history of anyone who had been alive and beyond their Emergence twenty years before. Tankball was a popular and evergreen subject. If something had happened at a tankball game, then someone would have spoken of it.

  It was tedious work. There were five thousand people on the ship and at any one time, most of them were adults. It meant that better than four thousand people fit her criteria. Just moving back through twenty years of logs for one individual took a while. As well, she wasn’t sure the event was exactly twenty years ago, so she searched for ten years on either side of the twenty year mark.

  During the day she kept up her day job, reported to the Aventine to continue the research and analysis for Micah’s project, then hurried home every night at eight to tend her garden, spend a few precious minutes going through twenty-year old profiles on the Forum, before falling into bed and sleeping like the dead. Micah no longer had to kick her out of the suite at eight every night, even though he always showed up to make sure she actually left.

  Laura found her first hint of the event she was looking for nearly four weeks after Erron had mentioned it. It was a diary entry, short and pithy.

  The Panthers game moved to tonight, because of the collapse at the arena, which means I can go, after all.

  She stared at the single line, her heart beating a little harder. In all her weeks of searching, she had found no mention of something collapsing at the arena. Perhaps it was a person who had collapsed, only no one would re-schedule a game because of something like that, no matter how tragic the outcome.

  To move a game to a different night meant something major had happened. Now, she had a date, too. Twenty-one years ago, right when Erron remembered it.

  Her eagerness renewed, Laura flipped back to the news datariver and tapped into 381. Now she had a date, she could dig down into every single item that had happened on that day, looking for the smallest hint.

  There was nothing there.

  It took her a while to spot the tampering, because it was the absence of data, rather than an addition. The newsfeed numbered the items for a day and out of curiosity, she counted the actual items.

  Three were missing.

  Laura moved on to the next day’s items and counted those. Another five were missing and four more, the next day.

  She went to bed then, to think it over and absorb the idea that someone had deliberately gone into the Forum and deleted news items, which formed the history of the ship.

  In her heart, she knew that Micah had done it. He had the skill and it seemed he had the motive. The data he had erased would have explained why he had done it, but it was beyond reach, now.

  What was he hiding?

  * * * * *

  The next day was a rest day. Laura didn’t want to face Micah when she was still trying to process the confirmation that he had deliberately removed news items from the ship’s history. Her friends had often told her she had an easily readable face. She didn’t want Micah to see her quandary.

  For only the second time since she had begun the research for Micah, she stayed away from the Aventine for the entire rest day. There were seeds to collect and germinate, seedlings to split and refine, earth to till and plantings to plan. Tivoli and the others would be meeting at the café in the market square later in the day and she would be able to see everyone together for the first time in months. The café was popular, so there would be other friends there, too.

  Laura immersed herself in the work, grateful for the distraction.

  When Lars headed for the rest day game, he called out a farewell and waved. His departure left her truly alone in this tucked-away corner of the Esquiline.

  Laura heard the low, almost silent motor of the little car an hour or so after Lars had left. The game would have started by now, so there would be very few people out and about. They would either be in the arena itself or at home with a screen up in front of them, or next to them as they worked on personal projects. Rest days were really only reprieves from the work of one’s profession. Laura didn’t know anyone who really, truly rested on their rest day.

  She walked to the front edge of the roof, brushing off her hands. Her hair was tied at the back of her neck to keep it from trailing through the earth as she worked and she fought the odd impulse to take out the ties and let it swing loose.

  Micah got out of the car and looked up at her. As usual, he didn’t speak.

  “Are you checking up on me?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She didn’t know what to say to that.

  “The only time you have not worked on the research on a rest day was at my direction. I wanted to make sure that you had chosen not to work today, that nothing else was preventing you.”

  “You could have called. My comms code is on the Forum, just as everyone else’s is.” Except yours.

  “I wanted to see this garden of yours that everyone is talking about.”

  “Everyone is talking about it?”

  “Your friends are. You have a large circle of friends.” He shrugged.

  “You’ve been hanging out on the Forum, Micah? That’s…sociable of you.”

  She could see his eyes roll even from up here on the roof.

  “May I come up?” he asked.

  “Of course. Only…” She bit her lip. “It’s a ladder.” She waved toward the ladder. She couldn’t warn him. It would tell him she had seen him limping. She didn’t know why he limped, yet. He had gone to tremendous lengths to hide both the weakness and the reason for it and wouldn’t like her being aware of it.

  Micah didn’t hesitate. He moved around the apartment to the bottom of the ladder. Laura walked over to that edge to watch him climb. Her heart was hurrying along and she didn’t know why.

  He moved up the ladder as quickly as anyone else might have. At the top, he stepped down onto the roof and she saw his jaw flex. The tendons in his neck worked hard, above the neck of the simple black stretch shirt he was wearing.

  Then he looked around. “You’ve planted already.” He moved over to the short rows of tomato seedlings she had planted only this morning. “Tomatoes. And what are these?”

  “Borage,” she said. “They’re companion plants.”

  He didn’t bend over or crouch to look at them as anyone else would have. Instead, he turned slowly, taking in the rest of the roof and the squared off beds at the back end.

  “There’s not much to see just yet,” she said, almost defensively. “Come back in three months’ time and you won’t be able to see the soil for foliage.”

  “I will.”

  She w
as surprised. It had been a casual phrase. She hadn’t meant him to take her at face value. Uneasy, she shifted on her feet. “Well…I need a drink. Do you drink coffee, Micah?”

  He shook his head. “You’re only being polite. I don’t want to intrude on your day.” He glanced at the top of the ladder, yet didn’t move.

  Laura bit her lip. Was he hesitating because of the climb down? He had winced in pain when he had stepped off the ladder.

  She studied him. He was wearing all black again. She couldn’t remember seeing him in anything else. Even without the jackets he usually wore, his shoulders were very wide and thick with muscle.

  He was keeping his head averted from her. Perhaps he didn’t want her to watch him climb down.

  She stirred. “I’m parched,” she said honestly. “I’m going to head down and get some water. Take your time.” She gave him a stiff smile and moved around him and over to the ladder. She climbed down quickly, her feet finding the flat steps out of habit. She rarely thought about the process of climbing up and down the ladder. Now she noticed every step, the space between them and the distance to the floor.

  Laura hurried around to the door and went inside. Just inside the door, she hesitated. She should get the water as she said she was going to, only she couldn’t quite close the door.

  Then she heard the muffled cry of pain.

  She almost ran back around to the ladder.

  Micah was hanging from the top rung, his knuckles white. His left leg dangled uselessly. His eyes were shut tight and his face etched in pain.

  Laura didn’t think about it. She clambered up the steps, until she was beside him. She put her arm around his back and gripped the other side of the ladder. It was a stretch. In order to reach the other side, she had to press up against him. It locked him into place, though.

  “I have you,” she said quietly. “Try to put your foot back on the step.”

  He drew in a harsh, ragged breath and let it out. She felt his hip move as he brought the weak leg back to the step.

  “Put your weight on it,” she whispered. “Go on.”