“Do they know we’re here?” Annis asks.
“… and whatever the problems are, is there no way to talk about going in on this together? It’s a chance to build something new.”
Annis leans across the table. “How far is the colony?”
I look back and forth at the two of them. Another colony. They think there’s another colony on the planet.
“I’m sorry for the problems you’re having here,” Jill says. “But help is not something we’re able to provide. We extend our best wishes to the Outside.”
Showing sympathy, stating facts plainly, without giving personal details, using the vernacular, remaining positive. It’s straight out of the training files. And it’s stupid.
“Cyrus,” I say, “I’m from Earth.”
For the people of knowledge and memory have been given a gift, a tool, our most precious weapon. And it is called the Forgetting.
FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF JANIS ATAN
It’s interesting being dead.
I don’t Know how long I’ve been this way, but I’ve mapped almost all the rooms of my mind, following the thin tendrils of connecting thought when they ask for my attention. Letting them slide through my hands, picking up their ends. I hold the strings of my memories now, and instead of their yanking me, I can follow them, gently, and go to the room of my mind that I choose.
I visited Adam’s death, but only once, to think about what my mother had done, to listen to my father’s tears. Did he Know that she condemned and poisoned her own child? I think he did. And I’m sorry for him. And angry with him. But what had my brother done?
I followed the string of my thoughts, listened to Adam say, There is no Earth and There’s nothing wrong with the sun … And I watched, bouncing on the bed, while he put on his shoes for the Outside, telling me to lock my door during the celebrations. To open it only for him, no matter what I heard. That he would come for me, take me to see the special sunrise.
Something was going to happen that resting. Something that didn’t. And Adam was coming for me, to take me away. Take me Outside. Maybe he wasn’t all that different from me. Maybe that’s why she poisoned us both.
Controlling this memory does not mean I can control its pain.
So I run down the halls and find the room in my mind that is the cave with Beckett. I’m grieving in here, too, feeling the pain of losing Adam, but I am also being held, a hand on the back of my head, the warm smell of Beckett’s skin. Here, I can be comforted.
There are many different ways to be comforted.
Sometimes I visit the technology with Beckett, or let him tell me about countries beside the blanket on the resting room floor. Sometimes he’s floating in the clear water, shining a light jar on a lake bottom of crystals. Or I go to the storage room and kiss his face while he strokes my back and the scars on my arms.
Being dead is also lonely.
I’ve read most of the books now, including the medical journal discussing the Forgetting, though there wasn’t much more information than what I read before Thorne Councilman came. I run my fingers over the spines, lined up on the shelves of my mind, and then I notice a high shelf, in the corner, dark, and when I stretch, and reach, I find a book on it. This is what was in the hole in my mother’s wall. What my father told me to cache. I suppose I did. I take the book down, sit on the floor, and open it.
It’s a book of chemistry. I go through it slowly. There’s no hurry here, so I linger on explanations and equations longer than I need. Until I get to a chapter marked Transcribed from the writings of Janis Atan. Janis was also a chemist, it seems, and the first topic she discusses is how to safely extract a useful substance from the seed pod of a Forgetting tree. There’s a drawing included, a heavily budded branch, thick with leaves. And I have seen this before.
I follow my memories to the labs Underneath, the tiny tree beneath the dome, the sliced pod in the glass box, the “clean space,” the vials of white powder in the wafting flowers. And then I cross a hall in my mind and I am in the Cursed City, beside the ancient bathhouse, surrounded by the blowing trees, walking down a road choked with roots. My mind nudges, I push aside the familiar, heavy branch, and now I’m looking at the black-inked words written neatly on a page of the chemistry book.
The time to extract Forgetting, the page tells me, is during the sporing cycle, which under the correct conditions may be forced. In nature, this is timed to occur only once every twelve years, when the passing radiation of the planet’s comet excites the blooms …
White sunrise, I think. I’ve never seen a white sunrise. None of the Knowing have. And then I realize—of course I haven’t, because the Forgetting is coming from the bloom of the trees, sporing beneath the comet every twelve years. We’re not being shut in for Judgment. We’re hiding from the Forgetting.
I look at the dosage amounts. They are minuscule. Even the smallest exposure would make someone Forget, and the Cursed City is full of thousands, maybe millions of those dangerous buds. It must be a miasma of Forgetting when the sky goes white, a cloud of spores made to catch the wind and travel. And why wouldn’t they? I think of spores riding the breeze to New Canaan, and my brother, twelve years ago, Outside when he shouldn’t have been, on the exact wrong day, in the wrong spot, breathing air that wasn’t meant for his lungs.
And now, after I’m dead, I finally find the Knowing of how to Forget. In a book that was in my head all along. I wish I could tell Beckett.
I read on through the writings of Janis Atan. Her research on Forgetting was extensive. And she found a cure, a naturally occurring substance that would reverse the brain inflammation caused by the spores. But when she distilled, concentrated, enhanced this cure, then not only did it stop the Forgetting’s impediment of a subject’s memory, it temporarily stopped the brain’s natural impediments as well. The cure for Forgetting, she writes, created a condition called Knowing, where the subject is not actually capable of forgetting anything at all.
Janis Atan, I think, was incredibly brilliant. And incredibly evil. She didn’t make these discoveries in her head. There are names here. Notes. Results of experiments.
Anna, Planter’s daughter. Fifteen years old. Forced immunity. Three sessions of injected exposure with memories intact. Air exposure resulting in extreme cranial and spinal pain before an immediate rise in blood pressure, leading to death …