Katie’s memories of Old Earth were a handful of brief, crystalline moments:
She recalled a snowy morning in the mountains, her mother cooking a breakfast of eggs and bacon and jam and toast, her father tromping through the door with an armful of split logs, their wagging, wriggling doggy all joyous barks and snuffling snout.
She remembered a glorious blue summer sky and great drifting clouds. There was a forest that rang out with birdsong, full of huge old trees and mossy rocks, and a glimpse of a deer leaping through the undergrowth. She must have been four or five years old. In later years she would wonder if she actually saw that deer, or if her mind had painted in the detail.
She also remembered smoke, and this she was sure of. Smoke, fire and rubble. And corpses, jaws agape, eyes like cold jelly. Father had scooped her up tight, her mother just ahead. She was covered with bruises and scrapes. There were others running too, and shouts in the distance. Their doggy was nowhere to be seen.
Somehow all the noise and terror had faded. She was with her parents and about a half-dozen other people in the back of a truck, or on a train. She had been hungry and thirsty and wasn’t allowed to look out the windows. She snuck a glance anyway. Long drifts of ash reached up into a hazy reddish sky, the earth was brown-gray and dotted with burned trees and the shells of buildings.
After an interminable time the motion stopped and the door slid open. The sun had long set, and everyone was very quiet. Her heart was pounding. She couldn’t smell any smoke and above the stars were thick in a clear, moonless sky. They walked for what must have been hours down a deserted road, past indistinct fields and dark silent trees, until she heard the rush of a highway in the distance. Their pace quickened and before long they came upon cluster of cars hidden away in a wooded pullout.
One by one they bustled into the vehicles, which activated noiselessly and vanished into the night. Katie slept in the back seat, nestled in her mother’s arms. Her father sat in front with the driver, speaking in low tones. She did not remember the driver’s face or name, or how long they were on the highway.
At last the car pulled up in front of a sprawling old mansion amid an expanse of green lawn and hedges. They stumbled blinking into the sunlight. An older, matronly woman was hurrying towards them, rushed up and embraced her parents, and Katie was taken aback by mother’s face, smiling but streaked with tears.
“Katie dear,” the woman said, stooping down. “You’ve grown so much.”
Her eyes were glittering black, set in a continent of seams and wrinkles over an arching nose and full lips. She gazed searchingly at the girl, then reached out and touched her earrings.
“These will have to go,” she said, and undid the clasps, tucking the little gold circlets away in the folds of her blouse.
“Katie, you remember Aunt Elma,” her mother said, and took her hand. “We’ll be staying here for a while. I need you to be on your best behavior, OK?”
Katie nodded dumbly, looking up at the adults looming around her. Their faces were dark with worry.
“Well, let’s get you all inside and tidied up,” Aunt Elma said, turning towards the house. “I guess you lost your bags in transit.”
She smiled ruefully and her father tried to laugh, but it came out as a strangled croak.
They spent several months in the big, secluded mansion. A place of curtained windows and dark wood interiors. Katie shared a bedroom with an older girl whose name she couldn’t quite recollect. Pamela? There were about two dozen other teenage girls there. Aunt Elma taught romance languages and classical literature in the mornings — Katie was especially fond of the Greek myths — and after lunch they studied mathematics, an incomprehensible topic about which she remembered nothing at all, followed by a dreary hour of calisthenics and phys-ed on the broad lawn out back.
Late afternoons were given over to chores and long reading sessions before dinner. She only saw her parents in the evenings, in the quiet time before lights-out. They would come and sit on the edge of her bed, and stroke her hair, and her mother would sing lullabies in a quavery voice. Her father sometimes accompanied on a guitar — she had never known he could play — plucking whispery chords and gazing at his beautiful ladies.
Her mother had joined the kitchen staff, rising early to bake bread, filling the house with the scent of hot rolls and fresh loaves. Katie and the other girls always awoke, mouths watering, and stampeded through the hall and down the wide staircase to the first floor dining room.
Father was working as a groundskeeper. She would watch him through the front window as he trimmed the hedges and dug in the flowerbeds. His beard was gone and he had cut his hair very short. It was a different color from when they lived in the forest. It seemed like another lifetime.
And one day she looked out the window as she was shelving books in the second floor library, and there was a black car in the driveway in front of the house. It was low and the windows were dark. She didn’t know why but she crouched down, below the sill. Noises erupted downstairs, feet shuffling and a car door slammed — several, in fact. She heard shouts and a series of sharp crackling sounds. And more sounds that made her head swim and she crawled down on her belly under the couch, in the deepest darkest furthest corner she could cram herself into. It was full of dust and she sneezed repeatedly and finally it was dark enough and snug enough to close her eyes and pretend she wasn’t there, that she was nothing at all.
She remembered a bright light, and being dragged out from under the couch.
“Here we are.”
“She’s just a child … ”
It was a severe-looking woman with her hair pulled back under a nun’s veiled hat. She was talking to a stern man, they were both in uniform and the man had a gun strapped to his side.
The nun reached down and turned Katie’s head to the left and right, massaging her earlobes. “Hmph,” she said, and they turned and paraded the girl out of the room, down the stairs. Katie became aware of a voice. Enraged. They strode through the hall to the door and as they passed the main library she saw there were piles of books on the floor. A man was shouting at Aunt Elma, who clutched the back of an armchair, and Katie never forgot her expression: huge eyes, mouth a thin hard line.
Outside, everywhere, were men in uniform. They all had guns. Off at the far end of the broad lawn where they played field hockey she saw a large crowd of people, all the adults of the house. Some of them were on their knees, and it had baffled her at the time.
She was surrounded by her classmates. They were all being herded into vans. She smelled smoke, again, and kerosene, for years it burned acrid in her nostrils. She looked back and it seemed as if a flight of dark birds climbed upwards. Her classmates were crying, and Katie was crying too, and for a long time thereafter that’s all she knew. She never saw her parents again. There were doctors and strange probing examinations. She stayed in a series of dorms with other girls and wore long dark skirts and a dark blouse and a hat when she went outdoors, which was only to go to classes, where they told her vaguely recalled stories about children, kings and God. Every night she cried, deep into the pillow. She remembered the cold little bunk, its hard mattress and wool blanket. The blanket was coarse and itchy, but enveloped her in an infinite soft warmth. She would convulse with sobs, and then vanish into quiet, dreamless sleep.
After three weeks the tears stopped. Not long after she had a visitor. It was the woman who had pulled her from under the couch. Katie clutched the blanket to her chest, the woman looked at her and blinked. She reached down and took Katie’s hand, took the young thing away from the dorms, away to the spaceport. The train ride was long and cold and the windows were opaque, she couldn’t see outside and didn’t know night from day. At one point she awoke, wrapped in the scratchy wool blanket. The woman was softly caressing her hair. It was vastly quiet — even the sound of the lurching, hurtling train was muted.
And that was all Katie remembered of life on Old Earth.
Next: The Separation — Chapter Two
copyright (c) by Josh Wilson