The Death of the Wave (8 page)

a creature whose death throes would at worst be tedious and at best amusing,

but I had fallen in love, and love makes you blind.

Name. Score. Assignment.

He had addressed the Breakers instead of me

and for the first time in my life I saw them, really
saw
them.

Descartes, his poisonous words… but I knew.

I knew they must be part of it all, on the side of these angels.

But the Breakers, the monsters that mothers threatened their children with humor and more than a little fear, these boogeymen in the dark, they were human and they were alone.

I met the eye of a scarred one across the way that had been watching our little entourage with lazy disinterest and was rewarded with a smile that evaporated like breath off a blade.

Who were they then, these faces?

Did they not feel what I felt, there at that moment?

So I stood, quiet and alone, before the giant, the writer with the Second-Tier Painter name, overpopulation incarnate.

But in those eyes and that benignly smiling face

I saw the problems of the ages wiped gently away.

And he was like a being, a being of light, so pure and so beautiful,

but beautiful in the way that ice is beautiful,

all brilliant rainbows and facets, without the burden of heat.

His hand on my shoulder was insubstantial as a snowflake.

They are cruel, aristos, as we all would be were we gods,

without the fear of morality or time.

But he smiled and told me

“Welcome home.”

And I was lost.

I was lost.

The first time,

I met a monster.

It was in the Palaces

and dressed in the clothes of an angel.

This was an aristo?

The perfect male animal,

and I heard that they are beautiful.

I saw him on the television, third channel, and he was—

His eyes were the eyes of a shark rolled over.

His skin was pock-marked, the shade of an eggshell crushed beneath the heel of a king.

Galileo.

The acknowledged savior of Eden from the scourge of the words.

Nothing more, nothing to say.

Name. Score. Assignment.

And his child, Darwin, smiled, his eyes are black, with no whites at all.

His growing child took my hand in his, with those elegant, dangerous fingers, to lead me on,

past Galileo, the petulant child-king, it would have been unwise to ruin his fun.

And the tall shape, as I left, with its mouth slashed into its face like parchment

stood to full height.

Told me of its pride of me.

Its hopes of me.

And it knew my new name.

This thing in the Palaces, this old deceiver,

it knew my name.

Its words were human, its voice was soft, soothing, as delicate as cat’s claws snagging fabric.

I looked around me and found everyone taken in, as if blinded by the beauty of this thing

that shone like the sun, this thing that masqueraded as an angel.

This monstrous thing that cavorted in the sunlight, and one dead eye folded down

in a grotesque wink, as if it knew all the secrets of the world.

It knew that I could see—

He was beautiful, this aristo, but beautiful like a tragedy,

a cheap veneer that can be gently pried away.

And what was hidden behind the mask—

Darwin, all adolescent gangling and welling black eyes, tugged me away.

I am not meant to find him beautiful.

As I went about the corner, I saw the tall shape bend

and reach one hand around to wave a slow goodbye.

Learn, Galileo told me.

“See what you can see.”

And I did.

I did.

Books of the Edicts, condensed, helped reorganize my priorities.

I read in the Palaces long and late into the night but in the Human Services public library,

my sources were limited.

On the wall above the single shelf, a smug Artist, hired for her graceful propositions

and oblique dark eyes guaranteed a higher score

across targeted areas on the CEE for a month in tutor’s care.

A week.

Galileo had graciously given me a week on probation from work,

leaving me with more free time than I knew what to do with.

I spent my time healing, a hired norm from Health Corps at my beck and call.

He was supposed to keep track of my feeding times to make sure that I was not starving myself, and to avoid the conflict, I managed to eat a small amount each day.

I passed my days in a kind of haze, allowing my hired man to paint on the salve,

eating the tasteless gruel fed to all valuable invalids,

and writing letters to my mother that she would never receive.

All times I was not followed, I ended up there.

“What are they, these scars?”

And an aristo, Descartes, sat across from me, with his small careful movements.

I was startled, I didn’t hear him come in.

He was a stranger, a background figure, an expensive piece of the menagerie,

but I recognized his pedigree.

It is easy to tell, the way they hold their heads.

He reached, traced a facial mark to its source, its tributaries.

“What reason, what crime?”

I started at his ignorance of my tragedy and his flesh that was like marble but

his black eyes were warm, and there were small crinkles around the edges

where he had smiled far too much.

I had never been so close to another aristo before save for Galileo and Newton,

and had learned all about might and majesty.

This was different.

I could feel the strange heart beating.

“Your crime,”
he questioned again, his eyes flashing as if in recognition,

and my answer was pulled, unmeaning, from the darkness.

“Love.”

“Love,”
he repeated, puzzled, the voice of a man forgetting a dream upon waking

and he stood as if to put his jacket about my quaking shoulders.

When you can’t remember—

to love is to forget.

And then, embracing me, were arms of sheathed ice and a voice like a violin

gathering and releasing all the sadness in the world.

“It’s all right.”

A whisper. A smile.

“I know now. I know who you are, and what you have done.”

And in the concave chest his strange heart beat for something other than me.

I am not myself.

But

I cannot remember how I was before.

I had been four years in the Citadel before I spoke to her.

The light was gleaming about her dark hair like a slipped halo as she stood alone,

watching the arterial Watchmen in their neat ranks.

Order. Precision.

Was she different?

Breaker 256.

Different from the rigid silent lines of Breakers in the Palaces, shining uniforms,

a world hidden behind a face as smooth as stone?

No, she was not different, but she was alone.

The deep-set eyes were so far away.

Standing there like a statue long worn by wind and rain,

she would outlast us all.

But she turned to go as I approached,

a sixteen-year-old boy stammering in the snow.

And in desperation I grabbed her arm to stay her

and for the first time she looked at me.

The delicacy, the randomness of the scars across her forehead and cheekbones stopped me,

the white-trails of some long ago tragedy.

Still forgotten.

“I know you,” I said, and watched the dark eyes flicker like flame.

“I don’t think so.”

But I did, and I do.

The tired Breaker watching my initiation with disinterest,

the smile that evaporated so quickly it was almost as if I had imagined it.

“My initiation,” I told her, not relinquishing my grip, and her gaze was amused,

the corner of her mouth lifting slightly in the crooked half-smile I remembered.

“I remember. Promotion specialist. But how do you—?”

“Your scars,” and the smile faded as if struck from her face.

Images of her then, how she had watched and waited,

the only one who shrank back from Galileo’s glance.

She tugged her arm gently out of my grip and began to walk away.

I ran after her, panting, to keep up with her long strides.

She did not turn her head.

“Go away.”

Stubbornly, I jogged by her side.

“Not until you tell me your name.”

“Breakers don’t have names. Everyone knows that.”

“Then I have to write one for you.”

I reached for her again.

She stopped in mid-stride, her dark eyes blazing, one hand going for the stunner gun

I was certain was concealed beneath her coat.

I opened my arms, my chest free for aiming.

“Shoot,” I told her, but she did not answer.

Nothing but the flash of fiery eyes in a face as pale as snow.

Finally she dropped her hand from her weapon, turned her head and asked me,

“Why?”

My answer sprung to my lips without thought.

“Because you can’t just be another person.”

Silence, and we regarded each other.

Her eyes were focused on an indiscriminate point far off in the distance,

occasionally darting back to me as if afraid.

I drank in everything about her with the eyes of an Artist, her graceful proportions and

fragile, helpless hands, hands of a woman of leisure that were never meant for a gun.

I moved a step forward and she flinched away.

“I won’t hurt you.”

She uttered a short laugh and told me to:

“Go home. Write your little lies, but spare them to me. This is no place for a child like you.”

“My name is Blue.”

I faced her then, searching her eyes for a hint that I had gotten through that formidable exterior.

I searched for her heart.

“Blue. A painter’s name.”

Another broken smile.

“Even your name is a lie.”

“What could you possibly want from me?”

Nothing. Everything.

“You.”

Home.

My mother slept on the threadbare couch, her knees drawn up to her chest.

She looked like a child, and when I kissed her cheek and pulled over the blanket,

she stirred, half-forgetting.

“’34, is that you?”

“No,” I told her, and she shifted slightly.

She must had been near asleep, her breathing was slow and even.

She would not

could not

remember.

“
When is he coming home,”
she mumbled, and I soothed her, tucking the blanket under her chin.

“He is not coming home.”

I watched the static dance on the television set and looked to nothing.

There was food in the house that I had not brought home.

My pay was late, and halved from my disgrace.

I never knew where she had gotten it,

and she was thin, thin enough to feel her bones

and not a fair opponent.

But it was empty, empty, without him and I sat there on the couch with my mother as she slept and I watched the static dance and I remembered.

Long ago, there was a man named Shakespeare, whose words were like music,

but most of his work was burned in a fire.

Descartes said to remember.

And I searched among our meager possessions

to find paper and a pen.

I found a pen, but no paper.

Nothing for my words.

But here, I found my brother’s CEE workbook.

It was still on the table, and I tore out an empty page to write on the back,

to compose my words.

My new assignment in the Hives was so soon.

Descartes.

One day we shall be together

but until then,

I wrote my words.

I did not sleep in my brand new bed.

The next day started my training.

Outside, there was only the hum of a stunner and the gentle toll of the clock-tower.

I had never been close to it before, it is so loud.

Loud as the world, and Galileo whispered the night-time edicts,

canned sound bites for a busy man after the death of Newton.

That was not mentioned, the rebellions, the failings.

All memory that exists was hidden, lest it happen again.

Author.

Such legends, it is as if she never existed.

Still she wrote,

as if come back from the dead,

but nobody knew who it was.

Darwin, the son of Galileo, the new aristo with the all-black eyes.

He told me that he saw the body executed for the people afterward.

If it had been Author, the Breakers had done good work, he said.

If it had been Author!

Half her face had been blown off by a close range rifle.

She was unrecognizable,

and it was for the best.

Everybody thought that she was a traitor.

So many had been killed in the chaos she created

that no one knew how to react when the writings started again.

The body that could have been anyone’s.

There again, urging a rebellion.

as if come back from the dead.

First night in the Palaces and I was alone.

I was used to sleeping in the company of others,

the nonsense chatter, the breathing, the thousand petty tragedies.

But I was alone, so I took out my booklet of Edicts

and read by faint electric light as if that would keep me safe.

I have kept the booklet, hidden it, treasured it,

and the handwriting of my friend fills up the slender margins.

Somewhere within the pages is a dark-haired boy smiling.

I told him he was clever, and that he was not to worry.

He told me I was silly and ran off to join the line.

I wondered what he felt when they put the gun to his head

in the line with the others, like vegetables ready for reaping