The world was changing. The stories had become different. Ever since that one scary night.
She heard guns again, and fear clawed at her insides and a hideous image loomed above, of a man whose face and voice she recognized. She could barely sleep that night, and for several nights.
By day she stood on interminable lines, leaning wearily on Sister Leah, and then they were sitting on a floor in a large room full of people, it smelled of sweat and her whole body ached. They were given trays of blandish soup, bread, and an orange-y drink full of fizz.
Men and women in uniforms she’d never seen gave them papers and directed them toward different corridors and doors. She answered questions about her family for a long time, and cried at one point.
It was right after someone said that she was brave. And suddenly she felt more alone than anytime in her life, surrounded by frowning strangers who would scribble on charts every time she opened her mouth.
Then she was walking again, walking for a long time, though endless hallways, over blank floor and then short, nubbly brown carpet.
She met a nurse named Martin, and a doctor named Angella, and that’s when she knew. That the world was changing.
Before, the men were always the doctors.
Angella passed a device over her forehead, held it against her wrist, shone a light in her eyes (blinding colorflash, dazzling and faded), and pricked her arm a few times.
Katie flinched at first, but it was just a tiny instant of pain, and seemed utterly insignificant, comparatively. She was given a jar to pee in, and then was asked to stand in an empty room. She was swept over by gooseflesh and her hair seemed fit to stand on end.
And the door opened again.
“Just want to make sure there are no little bugs on you,” Angella said. “Nanobots, you know. And it looks like you’re perfectly clean!”
The doctor smiled. Katie was scared of nanobots for several years after, and would always wash her hands twice, even into her teens, when she knew more about what they were, and the futility of soap in treating them.
At some point they must have boarded another ship, because she noticed that the ceilings reached up into a graceful curve, but previously were square-cornered. They took her up a long, gliding escalator overlooking a vaulted atrium that was crawling with people.
Above the ceiling was transparent and bright with stars.
There was a quiet corridor full of doors, and one of them opened for her into a grand suite with a wall that could be set to reveal any type of scenery she could imagine — castles, gardens, dolphins coursing through iridescent water. And they had a bathroom, and a separate bedroom for both herself and Leah.
“Just Leah,” the nun had said, faintly contented. “I’m no longer a sister.”
Her cheeks were smooth and suffused with a pale blush that made Katie think of the plums her mother used to pluck from the boughs of the tree in their yard.
Leah stopped wearing her habit, and her hair was loose and beautiful about her shoulders. They would sit at opposite ends of the big couch reading late into the night. No curfew on this vessel.
Sometimes Katie wrote or drew in a little notebook issued by one of the day-school teachers while Leah stared at a book, lips moving silently as her eyes traced the outlines of each word.
There were books everywhere, in piles and tottering heaps and flung open to pages densely inscribed with characters and symbols and illustrations. They smelled of dust and paper and something else, char and a roaring heat that curled and blackened pages, sent them up in wisps of smoke and ash, like wings.
Words became their sustenance, succulent and thick with meaning; vocabulary they gulped in heady draughts, and grew dizzy with the knowing. Verse and sentence would knit themselves together in Katie’s notebook, surprising her with their byways and intersections.
One Sunday she wrote an entire poem, in the quiet of the library, and told Leah several days later, who wanted it read aloud.
The girl stared at the paper, and then spoke, and the words that slipped between her lips seemed, somehow, more, or different, than when she wrote them down:
Feathers black and stinging white
Ravens then and mourning doves
Sent up high from me and lost
From towers burning, on sparkling gusts
My breath is hot and eyes betrayed
And it is so very silent
With the birds all flown away
She looked up then and was shocked to see that Leah had covered her face with her hands. Katie crept forward and touched her shoulder, and the woman shuddered.
“I’m sorry, Katie, I’m so sorry,” she gasped, and the child said that it’s ok, it’s just a poem, but the woman only sobbed inconsolably, and rushed to the bathroom, and the door eased shut.
Katie could still hear her, but remote, a dreadful echo.
Of her time between worlds, that yawned and stretched like a cat awakening, her memory was interspersed with such moments, tender, prickly, digging into her skin like purring claws. So much of life. Sweet blood lovingly drawn.
“Pain reminds us also that we are alive,” she wrote many years later, in a breezy moment that she would eternally regret. It was a dreary aphorism, and hardly original, but destined for recital by future generations who would never read it in context, but found it facile consolation at times of great or petty loss.
The long days in transit were broken up by classes and lectures and workshops, with recreation and free time limited to weekends. Literature she adored, of course, and art, singing, and history, which, as they neared their destination, she received in larger and larger draughts, and answered with just as many questions.
But in many respects she found Alexandrian education as grinding and forgettable as anything taught in the Jurist Sunday schools. Math and phys-ed, in particular, seemed both incomprehensible and cruel.
Least comprehensible of all was Alexandria itself, their destination. The 3Vs were spectacular, an oblong droplet glistening with detail, rotating slowly in the depths of the night.
But what was it? On another world she used to paddle in a kayak with her father along the wooded shores of a broad and rippling lake, and then through a narrow channel into a marsh full of cattails and dragonflies.
The air hot and still. He would dip a small jar into the water and later, at night, they would eyedropper a tiny bead of it onto a glass slide. Under the microscope, brightly lit, it seethed with life. Fascinating, alien, impossibly distant.
That’s what she saw when she saw the Magic Mountain, from way up in the sky.
“Far from alienating us from our birthright of wilderness,” she later wrote, a woman of letters and growing accomplishment, “Alexandria is in stark proximity to nature at its most primitive. The raw vacuum of space, the blasting radiation and atomic heat. The fluctuations of essential quanta. We dwell on the edge of this last wilderness, and set against it the made, the created, the constructed, that yet has breath and moss and thunder, and waters that rush and tumble into mist and clouds, and is full of yearning.”
Every day on Alexandria brought a new miracle. The beauty of the place was beyond speaking. But there were some things about Old Earth that Kate would never forget, even with the passage of whole chapters of human history.
Her mother in a hammock, asleep with a book falling back in her hands. Gold coins of sunlight on the lakewaters at dawn, wavelets lapping like whispering voices. The distant baying of a hound, lost and soon to be found, floating over the treetops, taunting her with the expression of a joy she could never share. Never.
As an old woman she would visit the glass-enclosed roses of the East Slope Botanical Gardens, so vulnerable to nanospores that she could only inhale their balm through exhaust vents. She would dab her eyes, remembering how, as a child, she would tease her thumb against such wicked thorns.
And once, at the New Mt. Holyoke Zoological Arboretum, she was startled by the flashing motion of a deer leaping away into the forest, and she stumbled and fell to her knees, staring.
They summoned an ambulance, and ran her vitals, and insisted that she take a nutritab.
“Let me go, y’damn fools!” she protested, as the medtechs pressed her and plied her with blinking, bleeping gadgets. Still, she took the tab.
But all that lay in the unimaginable future. Because now, right now, Katie is just a child, a waif, barely eight years old and watching her own shoes on the gangway — cold steel metal — and then the big doors pull back and she is dazzled by the light and a bracing gust of wind, sharp and hinting gloriously of fecund soil and growth, of chlorophyll and mycorrhizae, she laughs and claps her hands, staring at the bright, tawny-blue sky, at the stars flaring dimly through, at the whole immeasurable mountain rearing before her, a gigantic expanse sloping up from foothills dotted with swaths of green, light glinting on water in ribbons and misshapen disks, and the domes and spires and highways of human habitation, distant squares and geometric bisections demarcating plantations, and trade routes, and settlements, and ever-elusive in the distance some glimpse of a peak, and a glimmering light like a beacon.
They are standing on a long, broad lawn. Dozens of space ships of every size and description lift off and land soundlessly.
Another kind of flying machine, small, like a carriage rather than a sloop or cruiser, comes arcing out of the sky and drifts before them.
A man and a woman step out, and they speak with Abigail and Leah, who nod their heads attentively, and they all turn then and look at Katie, smiling.
But the child has pulled away, she’s running across the springy green turf toward the tulip beds and the great sweeping bulk of the mountain, and all the decades and epochs of a human life stretching out before her.
The End
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Copyright (c) by Josh Wilson