Aurora - Страница 7

“Ouch,” Devi says. “That one I understand. Now make a couplet out of it.”

This is another game they play. Badim goes first, as usual.

“Against our lives we would like to rebel,
But we worry that then it would all go to hell.”

Aram smiles his little smile, shakes his head. “A bit doggerel,” he suggests.

“Okay, you do better,” Badim says. The two men like to tease each other.

Aram thinks for a while, then stands and declaims,

“We like to blame life for the problems we make,
We threaten to change, but it’s always a fake;
We bitch and moan that everything’s wrong,
Then we get right back to getting along.”

Badim smiles, nods. “Okay, that’s almost twice as good.”

“But it was twice as long!” Freya protests.

Badim grins. Then Freya gets it, and laughs with them.

The next time Euan and his little gang approach Freya in the park, she picks up a rock and holds it clenched in her hand in a way he can see.

“You guys aren’t really feral,” she tells them. “Your little hole in the ground, what a joke. We’re all chipped, they do it when you’re a baby. The ship knows where we are every second, no matter how you try to hide.”

Euan still looks foxy, even with his mouth clean. “Want to see my chip scar? It’s on my butt!”

“No,” Freya says. “What do you mean?”

“We take the chips out. You have to do it if you want to join us. We’ll put your chip on a dog in your building, and by the time they figure it out, you’ll be long gone. They’ll never find you again.” He grins hugely. He knows she’ll never do it. He himself hasn’t done it, she sees that.

She shakes her head. “Big talk for a little boy! The first time they catch you off leash and check who you are, you’ll be cooked.”

“That’s right. We have to be careful.”

“So why are you talking to me?”

“I don’t think you’ll tell anyone.”

“Already told my father. He’s on the security council.”

“And?”

“He doesn’t think you’re a problem.”

“We’re not a problem. We don’t want to break anything. We just want to be free.”

“Good luck with that.” She’s thinking of Devi now, how what her mother gets maddest about is the idea that they’re all trapped, no matter what they do. “I don’t want to leave where I am.”

He stares at her, grinning his foxy grin. “There’s a lot more going on in this ship than you think there is. Come with us and you’ll see. Once your chip is gone you can do a lot. You don’t have to leave forever, not at first anyway. You could just come along and see. So it’s not really an either-or.” And with a final smirk he runs off, and his friends follow him.

She’s glad she was holding the rock.

Mysteries abound. Every answer provokes ten more questions. So many things change exponentially, as they are teaching her again in school now. Shift one dot just one spot, but it’s ten times bigger, or littler. Apparently this is another case of that deceptive logarithmic power: one answer, ten new questions.

What she is finding strange is that this silly Euan’s version of what is going on in the ship sort of fits with things that Badim and Devi say, and even explains some things her parents never talk about. Well, but there are so many things they have never told her. What is she, some kind of child who has to be protected? It irritates her. She is considerably taller than either Devi or Badim.

Then she spends another stretch of days in the crèche, trying and failing to learn the geometry lesson for the week, over and over, and Devi too distracted to take her along to work, even on their regular days. So the next time Euan and his friends Huang and Jalil confront her in the park, she looks for a rock on the ground, can’t find one, bunches her fists and swells up to them, and is indeed much taller than any of them, and when Euan invites her to go with them into the closed section of the park, the wilderness where the wild animals live, one of the places where the ferals hide, she agrees to go. She wants to see it.

She follows them up into a long narrow valley that seams the hills west of Long Pond, a valley closed to people by electrified fences running along the ridgelines and across the valley’s gorge of a mouth. There’s a gate in this fence of white lines running knob to knob on trees, and Euan has the code to the lockpad on the gate. Quickly they’re inside and up the valley on what might be an animal trail. The trail goes up the valley, next to a creek. They see a deer in the distance, its head up, looking to the side but regarding them cautiously, tail high off its rump.

Then there is a shout, and the boys all disappear, and quicker than Freya can quite follow things she is being held by the arms by two big men, and marched back down to the gate. They are taking her back into town when Devi shows up and grabs Freya by the arm and drags her off. The men are surprised, confused, and as soon as they are out of sight Devi pulls her around and down so their faces are only centimeters apart, amazingly strong her hands, and Freya can see the whites of her eyes all the way around the irises, as if her eyes are about to pop out of her head as she shouts in a harsh, grinding voice, a voice tearing out of her insides, “Don’t ever mess with the ship! Not ever! Do you understand?”

And then Badim is pulling her away, trying to get between them, but Devi holds on hard to Freya’s forearm.

“Let her go!” Badim says, in a tone of voice Freya has never heard before.

Devi lets go. “Do you understand!” she shouts again, face still thrust at Freya, shifting around Badim as if he were a rock. “Do—you—understand?”

“Yes!” Freya cries, collapsing into Badim’s arms, and across Badim into Devi so that she can hug her mother, so much shorter than she is, and at first it’s like hugging a tree. But after a while the tree hugs her back.

Freya gulps back her sobs. “I just wasn’t—I wasn’t—”

“I know.”

Devi strokes Freya’s hair back from her face, looking anguished. “It’s all right. Stop that now.”

Freya feels a wash of relief pour down her, although she is still terrified. She shudders, the vision of her mother’s contorted face still vivid to her. She tries to speak; nothing comes out.

Devi hugs her.

“We don’t even know if that wilderness is important,” she says into Freya’s chest, kissing her between sentences. “We don’t know what keeps things balanced. We just have to watch and see. It makes sense that a wild place might help. So we have to make them and protect them. We have to be careful with them. We have to keep watching them. We have to watch everything as closely as we can.”

“Let’s go home,” Badim says, herding them along with his outstretched arms. “Let’s go home.”

That night they sit quietly around the kitchen table. Even Badim is quiet. None of them eats very much. Devi looks distraught, lost. Freya, still stunned by that look on her mother’s face, understands; her mother is sorry. She has had something burst out of her that she has always before managed to keep in. Now her mother too is afraid; afraid of herself. Maybe that’s the worst kind of fear.

Freya suggests that they assemble her doll tree house. They haven’t done that for a long time. They used to do it a lot. Devi quickly agrees, and Badim goes to get it out of the hall closet.

They sit on the floor and put together all the parts of the house. It was a present from Devi’s parents to Devi, long before, and through every move in her life, Devi has saved it. A big dollhouse that is also a miniature tree house, in that all its rooms fit onto the branches of a very nice-looking plastic bonsai tree. When all the rooms are assembled and fitted onto the branches they are supposed to fit, you can open the roofs and look into each room, and each is furnished and appointed however you like.

“It’s so pretty,” Freya says. “I’d love to live in a house like this.”

“You already do,” Devi says.

Badim looks away, and Devi sees that. Her face spasms. Freya feels a lurch of fear as she watches her mother’s face shift from anger to sadness, then to frustration, then resolve, then fury, then, finally, to some kind of desolation; and after all that, pulling herself together, to some kind of blankness, which is the best she can do at that moment. Which Freya pretends is okay, to help her out.

“I would choose this room,” Badim says, tapping a small bedroom with open windows on all four sides, out on one of the outermost branches of the tree.

“You always choose that one,” Freya points out. “I choose the one by the water wheel.”