by Neil Clarke
Then she asked, in a voice I didn’t recognize, “Are you going to turn that in?”
Sympathizer, I thought, even though that was impossible—those were all gone.
I thought about tucking this into my shoe as we detoxed, walking from the bus pickup to the nearest news outlet. Would they even show it if I did?
It was foolish to think they didn’t know, if even part of it was true. They’d been on the ground for the protests. They had footage, if they wanted it. Where was I supposed to take it, then?
I thought, like a traitor, Would Jesse know who?
I thought about what would happen to me, if I took this outside, and word got out, and the Archives knew this is where I had been.
“It’s not up to me,” I said.
She looked at me for a second, eyes flat and hard, and then shouldered past me and headed down the open path as fast as she could, already pulling off her hazmat helmet, knocking aside a cloud of dust.
I handed it over first thing inside the tent, without even looking at the Archive monitor who took it from me.
“Would you look at this,” Kepler was saying as I went out, showing me some flier with the Homeland and Municipal seals at the top, and it was the most agitated I’d seen him since he was being escorted out of the tech tent, but I didn’t stop. I needed to be out.
The hazmat suit felt too close, everywhere, like I had stayed too long in one place without moving, and a layer of dust had settled so heavy I’d never get out from under.
File 78154406. One (1) incident report from the 87th Street police precinct. Reported by Officer [NAME REDACTED] on [DATE REDACTED], when the NYPD attempted to clear a cell of New Day New City demonstrators. Complaint lists a number of incidents of alleged police brutality. Destroyed.
THANK YOU, HOMELAND EVIDENTIARY CENSUS WORKERS
You are the most crucial workers in the field today. Every day, your work brings us closer to identifying the domestic terrorists who sought to bring down our city, and finding justice for the civilians they endangered. The difficult work of the next few weeks will be the linchpin on which our further operations rest.
You are the key to victory; you are the keepers of the Republic!
TO: Scope Manager
BCC: District Superintendent
Today while working in the field, an Archive worker discovered a motivational flier evidently intended for a Census Worker.
While we understand the importance of equality and personal validation across all industries during this initial phase of evidence discovery and rebuilding, this flier has had an understandable negative effect on morale on those under my scope. The catalog output has noticeably slowed over the course of the afternoon—correlated, one assumes, to rumors spreading among the archivists in my scope that the Municipal Authority hasn’t been completely transparent about the support they’re receiving from the city in doing their assigned work under time-sensitive circumstances.
Please let me know any ideas you may have about how you and I can address this issue and restore morale to the workers within my scope; I am eager to help in any way I can, both for the sake of my staff and to improve their productivity on behalf of the city.
Sincerely yours,
Scope Leader 10024-B
I’d never actually seen a Homeland car. I was still trying to figure out what ad would have required painting a police car black (perfume, maybe) when the agents stepped out, and it was only because they were wearing suits that I realized what was happening.
When they asked where my scope manager was (politely, so politely they had to ask twice, it didn’t sound like the kind of trouble I knew it was), I pointed, because chances were they knew who they were looking for, and they were just testing your loyalty to your scope.
They took him someplace no one ever found out, and spoke to him for an hour.
That night, as we were waiting for the buses, he showed up and started in.
“We are here to do the work the city needs,” he shouted, so loudly some of the electricians turned to look. “If you’re concerned about other scopes or sectors, you clearly do not have enough density of discovery at hand, and will be reassigned as I and the Municipal Authority see fit. I suggest that all of you concentrate on your own fucking tasks. The city asks for your help, but do not think this work cannot continue without you. We’re not finished here.”
The words echoed off the sides of the trucks for a second after he stopped. Then there was nothing. Everyone must have seen the car, or heard that they’d come.
From beside Kepler (she didn’t stand beside me any more), Jesse took in a heavy breath and held it. It was the only sound.
The buses slid north one at a time—86, 87, 88, 89.
When the bus dropped us off, and all of us went our ways, I saw that at each corner was a black cab with its call light off, pointed away from the intersection, and that one at a time they slid into the traffic and followed someone.
One of them went after Kepler, but he looked like he already knew.
(I should have asked him more about what happened, I thought. How long had our city been looking over our shoulders, and me with my eyes only on my own work?)
One of them turned the corner with Jesse, and I put my hand on my phone to call her and warn her, and let it drop. If they were watching us, they were listening to us.
This was what had been waiting for us, when we discovered anything they had asked us to discover, about the people they had rid themselves of.
The night had gotten cold, all at once, and even though store lights poured into the pavement and food carts along the avenue made rackets for the crowds, the street might as well have been empty, for how alone I was.
The car that followed me home parked in front of my building, right near the door. They had a mission, and nothing to hide.
To: Scope Manager
BCC: District Superintendent
I am in receipt of your message. Thank you for the swift reply.
Please understand that when I filed the initial question, the team morale had momentarily faltered due to the strain of the work and the circumstance that seemed to an outsider like potential carelessness from the Census division. In my initial questions, neither I nor any member of my team meant any disrespect or insubordination. We remain committed to our work.
Of course I have explained the situation to all members of the scope team, and they are very happy to be working alongside the Census team for the safety of the City’s people.
The situation has been resolved—I hope it will be to your satisfaction. Thank you again for your attention to the matter.
Sincerely yours,
Scope Leader 10024-B
If you stood on the east side of Central Park West at 89th, next to what was left of the wall, you could see straight down to the Museum.
They had trucks there already, mobile stations and cranes and trucks loaded with stone. A coat of ants moved through and over it, people separating everything they could and start rebuilding.
“I heard about this,” said Jesse.
She was standing carefully on top of the rubble, beside a file cabinet sticking up like a knife from the ground. We were in the middle of the street—the remains were from a truck.
It was a clear day, cool and bright. If you looked ahead of you, it was the patches of Park that were left, and the piles of dust, and the museum in the middle of the green like a palace.
(If you looked behind you, there was a cop car parked half a block away. There were more of them every day, studding the streets anywhere in our scope where the roads were passable. This one had an ad for orange juice painted across it, bright and crawling halfway up to the roof. They weren’t Homeland. They didn’t care who saw them.)
“There are so many,” I said.
There were so few of us—a handful of buses could carry us—and so much of what we were doing was still dust and trouble.
I looked around absently for Kepler, though I wasn’t sure why
I’d want him to see it. He should be looking at the park. He’d had enough unhappiness.
“The museum damage has been making the city look bad,” said Jesse, like she’d heard someone talking about it on the radio. (She hadn’t—there was radio silence about everything, since the Raid—but she always sounded like she knew her sources.) “They want something to show that it’s really over. That they got ‘em all.”
Sympathizer, I thought, but it seemed less terrifying now. Part of me was worried for her—they didn’t care if you were lying at all when they took you away, look at Kepler, she had to be more careful than this—but it was just a thing that made me numb, set in the row of other numb things, beside the place where you try not to tell plaster from bone.
I said, quietly, “I don’t know what they must have done, to bring this down on them.”
My voice shook, just saying it, like the cops a block away could hear me.
Jesse looked over at me.
She said, “It would have been someone, eventually. The city needs examples.”
That wasn’t how I’d meant it, I didn’t think—I’d wanted to know what they’d done, I wanted at last to ask questions—but it was over, and too late.
We pried the file cabinet out of the wreckage, and got to work.
File 30098516. Three (3) packing slips from medical supplies addressed to CityMed Mobile Clinic free medical service, with a parking permit for 87th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus. Invoices include: seventeen (17) cases of antibiotic cream, twenty-four (24) cases of medical gauze, four (4) cases of syringes; two (2) cases of analgesic ointment; one (1) case of vitamin supplements, three (23) cases of antihistamines.
CityMed Mobile records indicate these shipments to be atypical of the normal run of business. It seems highly probable the clinic was providing medical services to the domestic insurgent cell responsible for the Raid. Flagged RED. Have alerted Mayor’s office.
ADDENDUM: The District Superintendent has ordered the city to suspend all CityMed Mobile Clinic service pending investigation of insurgent sympathies within the organization. All documentation forwarded immediately to Office of the Investigator.
THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY WELCOMES YOU TONIGHT—ALL NIGHT
Metro Times—The months since the unforgettable Raids has been a dark time for New York. Rarely is a city forced to take action against its own. The shadow of domestic terrorism is a tough one to shake, and questions still linger about what could have been done to prevent the situation from escalating to the point of violence. That the insurgents were agitating for their goals, there’s no doubt—but that New York was the victim of friendly fire under executive order, there’s no denying.
The interim screening and security measures (temporarily overseen by the NYPD pending approval by the legislature) are only the beginning of a very tough hill New York—and the nation—will have to scale.
But New York is resilient—it knows how to rise from the ashes with flair. After months of tireless work by the newly-formed Archive and Census divisions of the Municipal Authority (sponsored by Central Trust Bank) throughout the Upper West Side, construction workers, conservationists, and curators were able to begin work on the restoration and rebuilding of one of the city’s most beloved institutions, the American Museum of Natural History.
Inch by inch, they’ve been fighting to repair every fossil, recapture every display, and reassemble every brick pulled from the blast site. “Every bone fragment we could find was the source of so much happiness it was like it was being excavated for the first time,” Museum Director Michael Archibald says. “When you’re trying to recover from something of this scale, every victory counts.”
And now, battered but far from broken, the Natural History Museum is once again opening its doors.
Beginning tonight at midnight, the Museum will open its doors twenty-four hours a day for the next week, a gift to the public and a symbol of the neighborhood’s indomitable will to rise above.
There will be no gala celebrations to mark the night. “This event is meant to be a good experience for those who want to come and enjoy the museum,” says Archibald, “yet we also recognize what the neighborhood has suffered and don’t want to trivialize that.”
The cleanup work continues. But for many this week in New York, an open door will be enough.
File 80005062. One (1) partial greeting card. Remaining text on the face reads “Happy Birthday to the Best—” Inside inscription, if any, missing. Recovered from sewer grate on northwest corner of 87th and Columbus Ave. Archived.
(R + D) /I = M
E. Catherine Tobler
Grapes grew differently on Mars and no one minded. This trespass was for science, ask anyone.
Perhaps they shouldn’t have grown at all, but they did, into oblong coils that turned the color of copper under the days of long, if distant, sunshine. We found they were best at night, when they froze into slush.
We would sneak into the vineyard, just the two of us, silent as we always had been. We had heard the humans wish for this ability, to be naked under the Martian sky, stretching in our low gravity, bodies coiling however they might. They pictured Martians like grapes, though never noticed any of us in those early days. They didn’t then know how close they were to the truth. Our bodies grew as slender as the grapes did, tethered to the ground by delicate webbed feet the way the grapes held to their vines, spout-like heads spread open to collect whatever moisture the air produced. The leaves and coiled vines hovered in the air, held back by only the weight of the fruit upon them. Once plucked, the vine sprang back, looking much like we did when we jumped.
It didn’t take us long to perfect our system of thievery, though we would both argue we weren’t stealing anything. A certain percentage of the crop would be lost; we reasoned we were taking grapes before they could be lost to conditions not even they could bear. The planet’s orbit would carry it farther and farther away from the sun, and the humans had not yet perfected their methods of harvest. They were still monitoring, calculating, devising. They wanted a year-round harvest; they were to be sorely disappointed.
We gorged ourselves amid the vines, unable to wait for the first taste of sweet grapey slush that befell our stigma when we crushed the grapes in our hurried hands. We ate until our bodies ached from the cold, then ate some more because we could. We sprawled on the ground, not drunk, but still intoxicated by the fruit, by the very idea that humans had come here and planted such wonders. We had never known such things. The humans found them commonplace, only an experiment.
Eventually, the outpost believed it had ghosts. One night, we overstayed our welcome and found ourselves lingering amid the vines as the humans patrolled. You—it was always you and never me—had chewed a vine and it stood out starkly against the sepia sky of mid-morning.
“Ghosts don’t chew grapevines.”
“Mars has no indigenous life—what else might have done that?”
The idea was absurd, but we learned early on that absurdity never kept humans from trying or thinking a thing. They moved past us and never noticed us amid the tangle of fruit and vines. Also absurd, considering how tall you stand and how your stomach growled (it was well past midday and stolen grapes eaten in the middle of the night cannot wholly sustain a body or the child within).
After that, we left them more clues. It was too fun not to. We also ached for contact, though our elders had forbidden us. Leave them be, we had been told. We wondered about the humans every day, because if they had something as wonderful as grapes, what else might they have? Clearly they were absurd—ghosts on Mars! they cried—but we didn’t care. One night, we left them grapes on their doorstep, spelling out a greeting in our language. They stared at the mess, unable to make anything of it. Knowing their language might help, you suggested with the curl of a lip. I scoffed.
We watched as the woman cleaned up the grapes, carefully placing them in a bin so that she might take them inside for salvage, study. But before
she carted them away, she paused and looked at the vines where we hid. We held our breath, clutched our hands. I think you were holding me back rather than holding on. We did not move.
The woman smoothed the ground flat before her. She made a shape, grape by grape, then went inside. Was it a word? We watched until it froze with nightfall, then ate it piece, by piece, by piece. In our bellies, it sounded like a welcome.
They have the most amazing things, humans.
We watch from a distance, but get closer all the time, and when we find a way in, we don’t immediately leave. It’s not their walls we sink through—those are as solid as anything, and we are only flesh and sometimes bone. It’s the minds we find a way into, because humans think so loudly.
They have come a long way—from the bluish planet in the sky, or so they believe. We remain doubtful, though we have not traveled beyond our own skies, so who is to say? They have brought with them wonderful things, things we cannot explain. Perhaps the blue world is filled with such things—the better we get to know their thoughts, we realize it is so.
Within their habitat, they have rooms where they appear able to return to their home world if only for a time. These rooms mimic landscapes they know, but also those they have never visited. Virtually, they can go anywhere. The woman loves these landscapes, the man is at first hesitant. Didn’t they come to Mars to see Mars? he asks.
He holds to her hand—and as we step into their thoughts (their skins), I feel your hand in mine, an echo of theirs. They walk across a watery landscape that has both breadth and width and a strange depth that glimmers with colors we have no name for. Their bare feet press against wet lily pads which they think look painted and we watch the water ripple outward, ever expanding rings that deepen the sense of unease we feel as we go.