My father snatched it, glanced at the back, then turned ashen white. “I didn’t… I don’t… yes.”
The scarf lay forgotten on the floor. I needed the bit of my mother’s love. I turned and hurried to the street. Martha would know where it had gone. The Christmas dream now a nightmare, I wanted to return home and find the scarf.
I hurried up the lonely stairs and into the quiet room where my time machine waited, crawled inside, closed the hatch, and pushed the lever. Nothing happened. I panicked in the tight confines, afraid to be caught in time, and a sense of claustrophobia washed over me. I scrambled out of the cylinders and checked the gears. All seemed in working order.
My eyes followed the power cord. It curled at my foot, the end cut off. The panel on the wall no longer had a hole that exposed the electric wires. With the heel of my boot, I knocked through the thin wood. I wrapped my jacket around my hand attached to cord to the wires. The bulbs inside the cylinder glowed.
I hurtled forward in time, the dials blurred. My heart raced. The lever rattled in my hand, my sweaty palms causing the cool metal to slip. The hour I wanted approached, and I eased into Christmas Eve, 1921, a bit late, but I refused to go back in time.
I lit the lamp, and the spiral staircase rattled as I scrambled down. My footsteps echoed in the large mansion, and I flew across the landing and down the wide staircase that tumbled to the bottom floor and spread like a wide stream. The telephone hung in the dining room.
Her voice sounded distant. “Yes?”
“Martha, Martha come quickly.”
“What is it sir, it’s Christmas Eve?”
“Just please come, and hurry.”
Martha sighed, and I hung up the phone. The floor creaked as I paced near the front door, waiting for her arrival. The mansion, with dark wood fixtures, sparse decorations, and cavernous rooms felt haunted, as if my grandmother’s ghost watched. I stopped and looked at her portrait over the mantle in the dining room. Her gaze, normally stern, her mouth set in a firm frown, now seemed softer, amused. A gust of wind shook the house and the lights flickered, then went out. Electric lines, so unreliable in the winter. I pulled the lamp closer.
Martha burst through the front door. She brushed strands of dark hair back as she took off her hat, then stomped her feet and clapped her gloved hands together. “Cold, wind came up, and the lights are out again I see.”
“The scarf, Martha, what have you done with the scarf?”
“What scarf?”
“This morning, when you took the clothes, you carried off a scarf with you.” I recalled to memory the trembling hands that knitted the Christmas gift. “It’s red and blue, green and yellow, what happened to it? Please tell me you have it still.”
Martha stopped paused, stripped off her gloves, and pinched the bridge of her nose. “That’s why you called me here, to ask about a scarf?”
I grasped her shoulders in my hands. “I cannot impress upon you the importance of that scarf, and what it means to me. Now please tell me you have it.”
“Why, what is it to you?”
I let go of her arms and took a step back. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“You want the scarf back? Then tell me why it’s so important.”
Her dark eyes shone in the lamplight, and mine locked onto hers. “You would believe the unbelievable?”
“Please sir, you must try.”
I’d held nothing back from Martha before. I led her upstairs, and she gasped as the secret panel slid to reveal the passageway. The cylinder seemed so foreign, so impossible, and I told a story more incredible still. I felt her eyes bore into me as I spoke, and I explained my father’s cruelty and my mother’s love, the watch’s blinding effects on over two decades of my life. “Odd, now that I tell it, I barely believe it myself.”
Martha took a step forward and tugged at my jacket, pulling me close to her. She touched my cheek. “You’ve been hit, your face is swollen.” Then, with a laugh, she poked my vest. “And I’ve never seen you without your watch. Oh, my,” she said, letting go the lapels. “You look a fright.”
“Perhaps, but that’s no matter. But now you know the scarf’s importance-”
“And you’d like it returned,” Martha said, unbuttoning her coat. The scarf wrapped around her shoulders.
“You have it!”
She ran her fingers over the soft yarn, and I reached out to touch it. Martha pulled back.
“What do you want for it? Money?”
Fire burst from her eyes, brighter than the lamp.
“I’m sorry, yes of course, this transcends money. What do you suggest then?”
She rubbed her chin as if deep in thought, but the upward curl of her lips told me she already knew the answer. “Come back to the party with me.”
I swallowed the immediate response which was to remind her of the social implications, the class barrier between us making any kind of public relationship if not impossible, extraordinarily difficult. I decided to rehash the argument.
She waited patiently, and then said simply, “I thought the same of traveling through time, impossible.”
How I loved this woman.
“Don’t worry, sir,” she said. “I’ll return it after the party.”
I acted exasperated. “Martha, would you call me Singletary? Especially at the party.”
“Oh yes. Of course!”
I changed my clothes into something clean and modern, then met Martha on the landing. “What’s wrong?” she asked after I paused. “You’re not backing out, are you?”
“Martha, I can’t shake something from my mind.” I leaned against the rail and looked over the dark house. “The watch. I’ve dreamt of it every night, slept with it, and during the day, how many times did I check it?”
“Hundreds, at least.”
“I miss it now. I feel lost without it, as if my life holds no purpose. I’m not sure I can go on.” I turned to her. “It almost had a hypnotic hold over me. I told myself it was my father’s gift, and that was why I kept it close, but now I’m not so sure.” Martha looked up at me, her eyebrows arched. “Did you mean it, what you told me earlier?”
“That I love you? I wouldn’t agree to go to the party if I didn’t.”
“Love is hypnotic, also. Perhaps we might find a way to replace those feelings ...” She paused, then smiled.
“I’m sure my father didn’t have the money to buy train tickets, until he took my wallet. He used my bank notes with future dates to board the doomed train.”
She touched my face, and I took her hand and headed for the stairs, then stopped. I felt for the watch, the vest pocket empty. “It’s gone now, lost in time, lost in a circle. My father will always steal it from me, and then give it back. No one created it Martha, it always was, always will be.”
Martha bit her lip and leaned close. I held her arm. “One last matter, I normally wouldn’t mention it.” The house groaned and a cold blast of wind scurried in through the wall cracks and swirled around us. The lamp flickered and almost blew out. I raised my eyebrows. “Who etched my name on the back?”
Martha lifted a hand to her face and stifled a scream. “Let’s get out of here!”
The bright lights of the party and merry voices calmed our fears. After the party, Martha didn’t return the scarf, and claimed if I were to return for Christmas, the scarf would be mine. Christmas was perfect, but she kept the scarf. The stakes to have it returned grew higher, and I followed her every command, until she wore the scarf as ‘something old’ during our most special occasion. Now the scarf belongs to us both.
Love did take the place of the watch, but the piece of love my mother gave me holds a special place in my heart. My father’s legacy, the watch, led to the time machine, which now waits, covered over with dust in the hidden room. My mother’s legacy, a work wrought of love, tears, and hard work, brought Martha and I together. I’m sure that would please my mother.
I only wish there was some way to revisit
that Christmas Day and tell her.
[email protected]
K.C. Neal
Kate Copsey Neal grew up in Boise, Idaho, spent 10 years moving around California and the Northwest, and then came to her senses and returned to Boise. She holds degrees in chemistry and health science, and sometimes wonders how that happened. Look for The Pyxis, her debut novel and the first book in a young adult series, in Summer 2011.
Pre-IQ
THE ONION SEEDLING FELL from Dania’s hand. Pain bloomed through her abdomen, and her heart thumped with apprehension. This was just another bout of those false labor contractions, she told herself. She sank into a nearby chair and squeezed her eyes shut. She was still five weeks from her due date, and this was just her body making adjustments, readying for labor. But this wasn’t it. Not yet. Jasper would be on the ground in just a week. Dania knew it was unlikely that the birth would happen during Jasper’s ground time between shifts on the carbon dioxide scrubber. But still, she hoped.
After a minute that felt more like half an hour, the pain ebbed and Dania took in a deep breath—as deep as her crowded midsection would allow—and tried to peer around her belly for the onion seedling she’d dropped.
“No, no, let me,” Molly appeared at Dania’s shoulder, and stooped to rescue the small plant from the greenhouse’s gravel floor. She tucked it into a cube of growth medium, her fingers curled protectively around the plant’s roots. Sweat and condensation slicked Molly’s face, forming ridges of moisture in the deep lines of her forehead, but she didn’t seem to notice. Her short-sleeved gray smock, the underarms already saturated with sweat, hung suspended from the horizontal line of her bony shoulders.
Dania wore an identical smock, except hers was shaped to allow for the extra bulk of her belly. The thin wicking fabric always felt slightly cool on the skin, like the underside of a linen-cased pillow, even in the pressing heat of the greenhouse. The smock helped a little, but at this point in her pregnancy the greenhouse might as well have been a steam sanitizer, every breath like drawing air through a wet block of growth medium.
“Another gut pincher, eh?” Molly tilted her head and smiled, her eyes crinkling in sympathy.
“Just a bit,” Dania said. She shifted and the feet of the chair crunched against the gravel under her weight. For the past few weeks, Molly had helped her drag the rusted folding chair along with them as they worked, so Dania could rest her swollen feet every so often. She patted the edge of the seat under her thigh. “Good thing you found this for me. Wouldn’t want you to have to pull me up off the ground.”
“Why don’t you take a minute there? You need to rest,” Molly said. She walked to the end of the raised row of growth medium cubes and rounded the end to her side, where she resumed planting onion seedlings. The air was heavy with the smell of wet soil, and the earthy-sulphurous scent of onion wafted from the flats whenever someone passed nearby. The greenhouse seemed to have its own atmosphere, with a barely-there veil of mist casting soft-focus over the pairs of planters bent over each row.
“Okay, maybe just a minute.” Dania leaned into the back of the chair and fanned her face with her hand. She kept her back to the west side of the greenhouse, where Tomiko and Constance worked the rows nearest the west wall. But Dania could feel the weight of Tomiko’s pinch-faced glare. Tomiko’s application for a permit to conceive had been denied last year, and she seemed to take Dania’s pregnancy as a personal insult.
“Where’s my resting chair?” The ugly shrillness in Tomiko’s voice carried through the greenhouse. Dania tried not to react, but she felt her shoulders hunching.
“Oh, hush up this minute,” Molly called, hands on hips. Molly was one of the smallest women in the greenhouse, but she was tough as sun-baked leather. Tomiko hushed up.
Molly shook her head and plucked another onion seedling from a tray. “You going to get that Pre-IQ when the baby’s born?” She spoke without looking up.
Dania felt a knot form behind her sternum. She stood and pressed her fingers into the small of her back. “I don’t want to. But Jasper says we should. Says we might as well just do it, since it’ll be law before the baby’s old enough to go to school.”
“Ah, well, ‘spose that’s true.” Molly tilted her head sympathetically and made a soft clucking noise in the side of her mouth.
Just before Jasper left for his shift, he and Dania had argued about whether to consent to the Pre-IQ test. He told Dania there was no point to her stubbornness. The test would be mandatory for all newborns soon, and starting next year a Pre-IQ would be required for school enrollment. She tried to explain why the Pre-IQ weighed in her heart like a stone, but Jasper didn’t understand. Experts said newborns’ Predictive IQ scores were true to their mature IQ scores in 999 out of 1000 cases. And World Administration needed to reserve precious higher education resources for the people who could put them to maximum use. Jasper said she might as well stop wringing her hands over one little test they didn’t have a choice about anyway.
Disagreements between them were rare, and the argument had sent Dania into a hormone-amplified crying jag that lasted half a day. They’d made up later over net video during one of Jasper’s breaks, but Dania’s apprehension lingered like a cloud of pollen.
There was no shortage of things to worry about these days, Dania thought. “Have you heard anything more about the lunar deportations, Mol?”
“Sheila told me Dave heard they’re gonna criminalize low Adjusted Contribution Scores. Maybe by the end of the year,” Molly said.
“He’s the one whose son works for World Admin, right?” Dania asked. She felt her eyes scrunching with worry. Jasper called it her fret-and-fuss face.
“That’s the one.”
The recent—and growing—mutterings about sending the lowest-contributing workers to the lunar Helium-3 mines wouldn’t affect Dania, most likely. Planters didn’t make an impressive wage, but had an occupation high on the Contribution Index. About as high as an uneducated worker could hope to land. That translated into very secure Adjusted Contribution Scores. But these days, you had to know the right people to get a high-CI job. And if the rumors were true, jobs lower on the Index wouldn’t be safe. Times had changed.
Molly clucked. “Used to be, the moon was just a prisoner colony where those repeat criminals and the real bad ones did their time. Now, it seems all kinds getting sent there. Nasty business.” Treason and nonviolent felonies could get you moon time now. And for the first time in history, women were getting sentenced to the moon. Living conditions there were cramped and unsanitary, and violence ruled the colony. Many prisoners didn’t survive their sentences.
The smaller crimes getting moon time was bad enough, but sending people to the moon for failure to Contribute, this was another matter entirely. People whose jobs were replaced by machines could get convicted of that so-called crime. People who couldn’t find work. People who didn’t meet their Contribution quota for two consecutive quarters. People like Dania’s father, peace upon his soul, who spent the last years of his life too ill to work but not sick enough to qualify as Contribution exempt.
Dania shivered. This was exactly why she worried about the Pre-IQ. A baby who scored poorly wouldn’t be eligible for higher education. Less education would mean a life working jobs on the low end of the Contribution Index. She knew for a fact that neither she nor Jasper had an IQ that would qualify for higher education these days. She might not be a genius, but she knew how these things worked. It would be folly to expect their child to score well.
Not for the first time, Dania wondered whether they should have let their conception permit lapse. Why would anyone want to bring a child into this world? She sighed and reached across her belly for another onion seedling. It was certainly much too late for such thoughts now. She tucked the seedling into a growth medium cube and firmed the medium with her fingers.
Molly mopped her forehead with one sleeve and glanced at a planter working a bed alone near the southeast entrance. “Guess
Sitara’s not coming back.”
“Tomorrow makes 21 days, right? At least Hans will get a new partner soon.” Dania watched Hans lift a tray of soybean seedlings. Sitara had been his planting partner until she’d stopped coming to work. After 21 days of absence unaccounted for, a position was considered abandoned.
“Wonder where that girl ran off to? Seems a strange time to leave a good job, a few months away from birthing a baby and all,” Molly made her clucking sound.
Dania didn’t answer. She knew where Sitara was. Not the exact location, but she had a pretty good idea Sitara had left the city to join one of the independent colonies, probably somewhere in the Rockies, in time to give birth. Sitara’s opinion of World Administration’s conception laws was no secret. “We’re not farm animals in the pasture, ready to be bred when the WA farmers say we may, if they even say we may at all,” she’d said, her dark eyes hardened in anger.
Sitara’s last morning at the nursery, she’d pulled Dania into a bathroom stall in the locker room as the rest of the women filed out into the greenhouse. Sitara’s thin fingers dug into Dania’s forearm, and she had such a look of intensity on her face Dania stepped back in alarm. The stall, barely large enough to hold two people—especially two pregnant women—prevented her retreat.
“You don’t have to have your baby in the system, Dania,” Sitara whispered, pushing her face closer to Dania’s. “You don’t have to be a slave to their rules. You’re too far along to go now, but there’s still a way. After the baby comes, you have to leave the birthing center before they reactivate your anti-conception implant. I know someone who can help you get out and get transport to the first relay point.”
Sitara gave her a code phrase and a com ID to call. She made Dania repeat it twice. Then she’d slipped from the stall, leaving Dania alone, the stall door creaking on its hinge.
Dania had heard of couples with conception permits, disappearing, running away to live beyond World Administration’s reach. Sometimes pregnant women would flee in their first or second trimester. If a woman joined an independent colony while she was pregnant, she wouldn’t get her anti-conception device reactivated and she could have as many children as she wanted. If she—and her babies—didn’t die of starvation, exposure, some complication of childbirth, or the hundred other dangers of living outside the system, that is.
Intrigue (Stories of Suspense) Page 14