chapter 10
The pattern in my neighborhood has shifted this evening; something is wrong. People wait at the air-train stop with faces closed, not talking to each other. They climb on without the usual greetings to those of us climbing off. A small white air car, an Official vehicle, sits sidled up next to a blue-shuttered house on our street. My house.
Hurrying down the metal stairs from the air-train stop, I look for more shifts in the pattern as I walk. The sidewalks tell me nothing. They are clean and white as always. The houses near mine, shut tight, tell me a little more—if this is a storm, it will be waited out behind closed doors.
The air-car’s landing gear is delicately splayed out, resting on the grass. Behind the plain white curtains in the window, I see figures move. I hurry up the steps and hesitate at the door. Should I knock?
I tell myself to stay calm, stay clear. For some reason I picture the blue of Ky’s eyes and I can think better, realizing that reading the situation correctly is part of getting through it safely. This could be anything. They could be checking the food distribution system, house to house. That happened once, in a Borough near here. I heard about it.
This might have nothing to do with me.
Are they telling my parents about Ky’s face on the microcard? Do they know what Grandfather gave me? I haven’t had a chance to destroy the poems yet. The paper is still in my pocket. Did someone besides Ky see me reading it in the woods? Was it the Officer’s shoe that snapped the stick?
This might have everything to do with me.
I don’t know what happens when people break the rules, because people here in the Borough don’t break them. There are minor citations issued from time to time, like when Bram is late. But those are small things, small errors. Not large errors, or errors committed with purpose. Infractions.
I’m not going to knock. This is my house. Taking a deep breath, I twist the knob and open the door.
Someone waits for me inside.
“You’re back,” Bram says, relief in his tone.
My fingers tighten around the piece of paper in my pocket, and I glance in the direction of the kitchen. Maybe I can make it to the incineration tube and stuff the poems down into the fire below. The tube will register a foreign substance; the thick paper is completely different from the paper goods—napkins, port printings, delivery envelopes—that we are allowed to dispose of in our residences. But that might still be safer than keeping it. They can’t reconstruct the words themselves after I’ve burned them.
I catch a glimpse of a Biomedical Official in a long white lab coat moving through the hall into the kitchen. I let go of the poems, take my hand out of my pocket. Empty.
“What’s wrong?” I ask Bram. “Where are Papa and Mama?”
“They’re here,” Bram says, voice shaking. “In their room. The Officials are searching Papa.”
“Why?” My father doesn’t have the poems. He never even knew about them. But does that matter? Ky’s classification is because of his father’s Infraction. Will my mistake change my whole family?
Perhaps the compact is the safest place for the poems after all. My grandparents kept it hidden there for years. “I’ll be right back,” I say to Bram, and I slip into my room, slide the compact out of my closet. Twist. I open the base, put the paper in.
“Did someone come in?” an Official in the hall asks Bram.
“My sister,” Bram says, sounding terrified.
“Where did she go?”
Twist, again. The compact doesn’t close right. A corner of the paper sticks out.
“She’s in her room, changing clothes. She got all dirty from hiking.” Bram’s voice sounds steadier now. He’s covering for me, without even knowing why. And he’s doing a good job of it, too.
I hear footsteps in the hall and I open the compact back up, slide the corner in.
I twist, a muted snap takes place. At last. With one hand, I unzip my plainclothes; with the other, I put the compact back on the shelf. I turn my head as the door opens, surprise and outrage on my face. “I’m changing!” I exclaim.
The Official nods at me, seeing the smudge of dirt on my clothes. “Please come into the foyer when you’re finished,” he says. “Quickly.”
My hands sweat a little as I pull off the clothes that smell of forest and put them in the laundry receptacle. Then, in my other plainclothes, stripped of everything that might look or smell like poetry, I leave my room.
“Papa never turned in Grandfather’s tissue sample,” Bram says in a whisper once I come back into the foyer. “He lost it. That’s why they’re here.” For a moment, curiosity overrides his panic. “Why’d you have to change your clothes so fast? You weren’t that dirty.”
“I was dirty,” I whisper back. “Shh. Listen.” I hear murmurs of voices in my parents’ room, and then my mother’s voice, raised. And I can’t believe what Bram told me. My father lost Grandfather’s sample?
Sorrow cuts through the fear inside me. This is bad, very bad, that my father has made such an enormous mistake. But not only because it might mean trouble for him, and for us. Because it means that Grandfather is really gone. They can’t bring him back without the sample.
Suddenly I hope the Officials find something in our house after all.
“Wait here,” I tell Bram, and I go into the kitchen. A Biomedical Official stands near the waste receptacle waving a device up and down, back and forth, over and over. He takes a step and begins the motions again in a new spot in the kitchen. I see the words printed along the side of the object he holds. Biological Detection Instrument.
I relax slightly. Of course. They have something to detect the bar code engraved on the tube Grandfather used. They don’t need to tear the house apart. Perhaps they won’t find the paper after all. And perhaps they will find the sample.
How could Papa lose something so important? How could he lose his own father?
In spite of my instructions, Bram follows me into the kitchen. He touches my arm and we turn back toward the hallway. “Mama’s still arguing in there,” he says, gesturing to our parents’ room. I grab Bram’s hand and hold it tight. The Officials don’t need to search my father; they have the Detection Instruments to tell them where to look. But I guess they have to make their point: My father should have been more careful with something so important.
“Are they searching Mama, too?” I ask Bram. Are we all going to share in our father’s humiliation?
“I don’t think so,” Bram says. “She just wanted to be in there with Papa.”
The bedroom door opens and Bram and I jump back out of the way of the Officials. Their white lab coats make them seem tall and pure. One of them can tell we are frightened, and he gives us a small smile intended to reassure. It doesn’t work. He can’t give back the lost sample or my father’s dignity. The damage is done.
My father walks behind the Officials, pale and unhappy. In contrast, my mother looks flushed and angry. She follows my father and the Officials into the front room, and Bram and I stand in the doorway to watch what happens.
They didn’t find the sample. My heart sinks. My father stands in the middle of the room while the Biomedical Team berates him. “How could you do this?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. It’s inexcusable.” His words sound flat, as if he has repeated them so many times that he has given up any hope of the Officials believing him. He stands up straight, the way he always does, but his face looks tired and old.
“You recognize that there is no way to bring him back now,” they say.
My father nods, his face full of misery. Even though I am angry with him for losing the sample, I can tell that he feels awful. Of course he does. This is Grandfather. In spite of my anger, I wish I could take Papa’s hand but there are too many Officials around him.
And I’m full of hypocrisy. I did something against the rules today, too, and what I did was intentional.
“This may result in some sanctions for you at work,” one of the Officials says to my father, in a tone so mean I wonder if she will get cited herself. No one is supposed to speak this way. Even when an error occurs, things aren’t supposed to get personal. “How can they expect you to handle the restoration and disposal of artifacts if you can’t even keep track of one tissue sample? Especially knowing how important it was?”
One of the other Officials says quietly, “You ruined the sample belonging to your own father. And then you didn’t report the loss.”
My father passes his hand over his eyes. “I was afraid,” he says. He knows the seriousness of the situation. He doesn’t need them to tell him. Cremation occurs within hours of death. There’s no way to get another sample. It’s gone. He’s gone. Grandfather is really gone.
My mother presses her lips tightly together and her eyes flash, but her anger is not for my father. She is mad at the Officials for making him feel worse than he already does.
Even though there is nothing to say, the Officials do not leave. A few moments of cold silence pass during which no one says anything and we all think about how nothing can save Grandfather now.
A chime sounds in the kitchen; our dinner has arrived. My mother walks out of the room. I hear the sounds of her taking the food delivery and placing it on the table. When she walks back into the room, her shoes make stabbing, serious sounds on the wood floor. She means business.
“It’s mealtime,” she says, looking at the Officials. “I’m afraid they haven’t sent any extra portions.”
The Officials bristle a little. Is she trying to dismiss them? It’s hard to tell. Her face seems open, her tone regretful but firm. And she’s so lovely, blond hair winding down her back, flushed cheeks. None of that is supposed to matter. But somehow, it does.
And besides. Even the Officials don’t dare disrupt mealtime too much. “We’ll report this,” the tallest one says. “I’m sure that a citation of the highest order will be issued, with the next error resulting in a complete Infraction.”
My father nods; my mother glances back at the kitchen, to remind them that the food is here and getting cold, possibly losing nutrients. The Officials nod curtly at us and, one by one, they leave, walking through the foyer, past the port, out the only door in the house.
After they depart our whole family sighs with relief. My father turns to us. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry.” He looks at my mother and waits for her to speak.
“Don’t worry about it,” she says bravely. She knows that my father now has a mistake logged against him in the permanent database. She knows that it means Grandfather is gone. But she loves my father. She loves him too much, I sometimes think. I think it now. Because if she isn’t angry with him, how can I be?
When we sit down to dinner my mother embraces him and leans her head on his shoulder for a moment before she hands him his foilware. He reaches up to touch her hair, her cheek.
Watching them, I think to myself that someday something like this might happen to me and to Xander. Our lives will be so intertwined that what one of us does will affect the other down to the ends, like the tree my mother transplanted once at the Arboretum. She showed it to me when I came to visit her. It was a little thing, a baby tree, but still it tangled with things around it and required care to move. And when she finally pulled it out, its roots still clung to the earth from its old home.
Did Ky do that, when he came here? Did he bring anything with him? It would have been difficult; they would have searched him so carefully, he had to adapt so quickly. Still, I don’t see how he couldn’t bring something. Secret, maybe, inside, intangible. Something to nourish him. Something of home.
Feet pounding, fists clenched, I hit the tracker running.
I wish I could run outside, away from the sadness and shame in my house. Sweat trickles down the front of my gymgear, through my hair, across my face. I brush it away and glance back down at the tracker screen.
There’s a rise in the curve on the tracker screen: a simulated hill. Good. I’ve reached the peak of the workout, the most difficult part, the fastest part. The tracker spins below me, a machine named for the circular tracks where people used to compete. And named for what it does—tracking information about the person running on it. If you run too far, you might be a masochist, an anorexic, or another type, and you will have to see an Official of Psychology for diagnosis. If it’s determined that you are running hard because you genuinely like it then you can have an athletic permit. I have one.
My legs ache a little; I look straight ahead and will myself to see Grandfather’s face within my mind, to hold it there. If there’s really no chance for him to ever come back, then I am the one who has to keep him alive.
The incline increases, and I keep pace, wishing for the feeling of climbing the hill earlier that day when we were hiking. Outside. Branches and bushes and mud and sunlight on the top of a hill with a boy who knows more than he will say.
The tracker beeps. Five minutes left before the workout ends, before I’ve run the distance and time I should in order to keep up my optimal heart rate and maintain my optimal body mass index. I have to be healthy. It’s part of what makes us great, what keeps our life span long.
All of the things that were shown in early studies to be good for longevity—happy marriages, healthy bodies—are ours to have. We live long, good lives. We die on our eightieth birthdays, surrounded by our families, before dementia sets in. Cancer, heart disease, and most debilitating illnesses are almost entirely eradicated. This is as close to perfect as any society has ever managed to get.
My parents talk upstairs. My brother does his schoolwork and I run to nowhere. Everyone in this house does what he or she is supposed to do. It’s going to be all right. My feet hit smack-slap on the belt of the tracker and I pound the worry out of me step by step. Step by step by step by step by step.
I’m tired, I don’t know if I can go any farther, when the tracker beeps and slows, slows, slows to a stop. Perfect timing, programmed by the Society. I bend my head down, gasping for breath, sucking in air. There is nothing to see at the top of this hill.
Bram sits on the edge of my bed, waiting for me. He holds something. At first I think it is my compact and I take a step forward, worried—Has he found the poetry?—but then I realize that it is Grandfather’s watch. Bram’s artifact.
“I sent a port message to the Officials a few minutes ago,” Bram says. His round eyes look up at me, tired and sad.
“Why did you do that?” I ask in shock. Why would he want to see or talk to an Official after what happened today?
Bram holds up the watch. “I thought that maybe they could get enough tissue from this. Since Grandfather touched it so many times.”
Hope shoots through my veins like adrenaline. I pull a towel from the hook in my closet and wipe it across my face. “What did they say? Did they respond?”
“They sent back a message saying it wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t work.” He rubs the shiny surface of the watch with his sleeve to clean away the smudges where his fingers were. He looks at the face of the clock as if it can tell him something.
But it can’t. Bram doesn’t even know how to tell time yet. And besides, Grandfather’s watch hasn’t worked in decades. It’s nothing but a beautiful artifact. Heavy, made of silver and glass. Nothing like the thin plastic strips we wear now.
“Do I look like Grandfather?” Bram asks hopefully. He slides the watch onto his arm. It is loose around his thin wrist. Skinny, brown-eyed, straight-backed, small—he does look a little like Grandfather in that moment.
“You do.” I wonder if there is anything of Grandfather to see in me. I liked hiking today. I like reading the Hundred Poems. Those things that were a part of him are a part of me. I think about the other grandparents I have, out in the Farmlands, and about Ky Markham and the Outer Provinces and about all the things I do not know and places I will never see.
Bram smiles at my response and looks down proudly at the watch.
“Bram, you can’t take that to school, you know. You could get in trouble.”
“I know.”
“You saw what happened to Papa when the Officials got after him. You don’t want them getting mad at you for breaking the rules about artifacts.”
“I won’t,” he says. “I know better than that. I don’t want to lose it.” He reaches for my silver box from the Match Banquet. “Can I keep it in here? It seems like a good place. You know, special.” He shrugs in embarrassment.
“All right,” I say, a little nervously. I watch him open the silver box and put the artifact carefully inside next to the microcard. He doesn’t even glance at the compact sitting on the shelf and for that I am grateful.
Later that night when it is dark and Bram has gone to bed, I open the compact and take the paper out. I do not look at it; instead, I slip it into the pocket of my plainclothes for the next day. Tomorrow, I will try to find a trash incinerator away from home to drop it in. I don’t want anyone to catch me doing it here. It’s too dangerous now.
I lie down and look up at the ceiling, trying again to think of Grandfather’s face. I can’t bring it back. Impatient, I roll over, and something hard presses into my side. My tablet container. I must have dropped it when I changed my plainclothes earlier. It isn’t like me to be so careless.
I sit up. The light from the street lamps outside comes in foggy through the window, enough to see the tablets as I twist open the container and spill them onto the bed. For a moment, as my eyes adjust, they all seem to be the same color. But then I can see which is which. The mysterious red tablet. The blue one that will help us survive in case of an emergency, because even the Society can’t control nature all of the time.
And the green one.
Most people I know take the green tablet now and then. Before a big test. The night of the Match Banquet. Any time you might need calming. You can take it up to once a week without the Officials taking special note of it.
But I’ve never taken the green tablet.
Because of Grandfather.
I was so proud to show him when I started carrying it. “Look,” I told him, unscrewing the lid of the silver container. “I’ve got blue and green now. All I need is the red one and I’ll be an adult.”
“Ah,” Grandfather said, looking properly impressed. “You are growing up, that’s for certain.” He paused for a moment. We were walking outside, in the greenspace near his apartment. “Have you taken the green one yet?”
“Not yet,” I said. “But I have to give a presentation on one of the Hundred Paintings in my Culture class next week. I might take it then. I don’t like speaking in front of everyone.”
“Which painting?” he asked.
“Number nineteen,” I tell him, and he looks thoughtful, trying to remember which one that is. He doesn’t—didn’t—know the Hundred Paintings as well as the Hundred Poems. But still, he knew it after enough thought. “The one by Thomas Moran,” he guesses, and I nod. “I like the colors in that one,” he said.
“I like the sky,” I told him. “It’s so dramatic. All the clouds up above, and in the canyon.” The painting felt a little dangerous—streaming gray clouds, jagged red rocks—and I liked that, too.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s a beautiful painting.”
“Like this,” I said, even though the greenspace was beautiful in an entirely different way. Flowers bloomed everywhere, in colors we were not allowed to wear: pinks, yellows, reds, almost startling in their boldness. They drew the eye; they scented the air.
“Greenspace, green tablet,” Grandfather said, and then he looked at me and smiled. “Green eyes on a green girl.”
“That sounds like poetry,” I said, and he laughed.
“Thank you.” He paused for a moment. “I wouldn’t take that tablet, Cassia. Not for a report. And perhaps not ever. You are strong enough to go without it.”
Now, I lie down on my side, curl my hand around the green tablet. I don’t think I’ll take it, not even tonight. Grandfather thinks I’m strong enough to go without it. I close my eyes and think of Grandfather’s poetry.
Green tablet. Green space. Green eyes. Green girl.
When I fall asleep, I dream that Grandfather has given me a bouquet of roses. “Take these instead of the tablet,” he tells me. So I do. I pull the petals off each rose. To my surprise each petal has a word written on it, a word from one of the poems. They’re not in the right order, and this puzzles me, but I put them in my mouth and taste them. They taste bitter, the way I imagine the green tablet would taste. But I know Grandfather is right; I have to keep the words inside if I want to keep them with me.
When I wake in the morning, the green tablet is still in my hand, and the words are still in my mouth.