The Passage (77 page)

True, she’d fudged the numbers. The morning he’d caught her throwing up her breakfast into the compost pile, she’d told him three periods, when it was really two. Three and it was Galen’s baby; two and it was not. Galen had come to her only one time the month she’d gotten pregnant; she had refused him on some pretense, she couldn’t even remember what. No, it was all perfectly clear to Mausami, the when and who. She had been down at the station when it happened; Theo was there, and Alicia, and Dale Levine. The four of them had stayed up late playing hands of go-to in the control room, and then Alicia and Dale had gone to bed, and the next thing she knew, she and Theo were sitting alone together, the first time since her wedding. She began to cry, surprised at how much she wanted to and by the sheer volume of her tears, and Theo had taken her in his arms to comfort her, which was what she wanted too, both of them saying how sorry they were, and after that it had taken all of about thirty seconds. They never stood a chance.

She’d barely seen him after that. They’d ridden back the next morning, and life returned to normal—though it wasn’t normal, not at all. She was a person with a secret. It lay like a warm stone inside her, a private glowing happiness. Even Galen seemed to detect the change, remarking something along the lines of Well, I’m glad to see your mood has picked up. It’s nice to see you smiling. (Her response, wholly absurd and nothing that could be acted upon, was a friendly desire to tell him, so he could share in her good news.) She didn’t know what would happen; she didn’t think about it at all. When she missed her period, she gave it scarcely any thought. It wasn’t like she was anything close to regular; she’d always been that way, it came and went as it pleased. All she could think about was the next trip down to the station, when she could make love to Theo Jaxon again. She saw him on the catwalk, of course, and at evening assembly, but that wasn’t the same, it wasn’t the time and place to touch or even talk. She would have to wait. But even this, the waiting, the torturous crawl of days—the date of their next departure for the station was plainly listed on the duty roster, where anyone could see it—was part of her happiness, the blur of love.

Then she missed another period, and Galen caught her throwing up into the compost pile.

Of course she was pregnant. Why hadn’t she anticipated this? How had this eventuality escaped her attentions? Because the one thing Theo Jaxon wouldn’t want was a baby. Maybe under the right circumstances she could have won him over to the idea. But not like this.

Then another thought had come to her, dawning with a simple clarity: a baby. She was going to have a baby. Her baby, Theo’s baby, their baby together. A baby wasn’t an idea, as love was an idea. A baby was a fact. It was a being with a mind and a nature, and you could feel about it any way you liked, but a baby wouldn’t care. Just by existing, it demanded that you believe in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in, live in. A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world made back to you. A baby was the oldest deal there was, to go on living.

Maybe the thing Theo Jaxon needed most of all was a baby.

That’s what Mausami would have told him down at the station, in the little room of shelves that was now theirs. She had imagined the scene unfolding a number of ways, some good and some not so good, the worst of all being the one in which she lost her nerve and said nothing. (The second worst: Theo guessed, her courage failed her anyway, and she told him it was Galen’s.) What she hoped was that she’d see a light in his eyes come on. The light that had gone out, long ago. A baby, he would say. Our baby. What should we do? What people always do, she would have told him, and that was when he would take her in his arms again, and in this zone of sheltering safety she would know that everything would be all right, and together they would ride back to face Galen—to face everyone—together.

But now this would never happen. The story she had told herself was just that, a story.

She heard footsteps coming down the hall behind her. A heavy, loose-limbed tread she knew. What did she have to do to get a moment’s peace? But it wasn’t his fault, she reminded herself again; nothing was Galen’s
fault
.

“What are you doing down here, Maus? I’ve been all over.”

He was standing above her. She shrugged, still giving her eyes to her horrible knitting.

“You shouldn’t be in here.”

“It’s washed down, Galen.”

“I mean you shouldn’t be here alone.”

Mausami said nothing. What
was
she doing here? Just a day ago, she’d felt so suffocated by the place that she thought she’d lose her mind. What made her think she could ever learn to knit?

“It’s fine, Gale. I’m perfectly fine where I am.”

She wondered if it was guilt that made her torment him so. But she didn’t think it was. It felt more like anger—anger at his weakness, anger that he loved her like he did when she’d clearly done nothing to deserve it, anger that she would have to be the one to look him in the eye after the baby was born—a baby that would, as long as life was being so ironic, look just like Theo Jaxon—and explain the truth to him.

“Well.” He paused, clearing his throat. “I’m leaving in the morning. I just came to tell you.”

She put her needles down to look at him. He was squinting at her in the dim light, giving his face a scrunched, boyish appearance. “What do you mean, ‘leaving’?”

“Jimmy wants me to secure the station. With Arlo gone, we don’t know what’s going on down there.”

“Flyers, Galen. Why is he sending you?”

“You think I can’t handle it?”

“I didn’t say that, Gale.” She heard herself sigh. “I’m just wondering why you, is all. You’ve never been down there before.”

“Someone has to go. Maybe he thinks I’m the best man for the job.”

She did her best to look agreeable. “Be careful, okay? All eyes.”

“You say that like you actually mean it.”

Mausami didn’t know how to answer that. She felt suddenly tired.

“Of course I mean it, Gale.”

“Because if you don’t, you should probably just say so.”

Tell him, she thought. Why didn’t she just tell him?

“Go on, it’s all right.” She took up her knitting again. “I’ll be here when you get back. Go to the station.”

“You really think I’m so stupid?”

Galen was standing with his hands at his sides, glaring at her. One hand, his right, closest to his blade, gave a small, involuntary-seeming twitch.

“I didn’t … say that.”

“Well, I’m not.”

A silent moment passed. His hand had moved to his belt, perched beside the handle of his knife.

“Galen?” she asked gently. “What are you doing?”

The question appeared to jar him. “What makes you say that?”

“The way you’re staring at me. What you’re doing with your hand.”

He dropped his gaze to look. A little
hmm
sound rose in the back of his throat. “I don’t know,” he said, frowning. “I guess you’ve got me there.”

“Won’t they be looking for you on the catwalk? Aren’t you supposed to be there?”

There was, she thought, something strangely inward about his expression, as if he wasn’t quite seeing her. “I guess I better go,” he said.

But still he made no effort to leave, nor to move his hand away.

“So I’ll see you in a few days,” Mausami said.

“What do you mean?”

“Because you’re going to the station, Galen. Isn’t that what you said?”

A glimmer of recognition came into his face. “Yeah, I’m going down there tomorrow.”

“So take care of yourself, okay? I mean it. All eyes.”

“Right. All eyes.”

She listened to his footsteps receding down the hall, the sound abruptly muffled as the door to the Big Room sealed in his wake. Only then did Mausami realize that she had slid one of her knitting needles free and was clutching it in her fist. She looked around the room, which suddenly seemed too large, a place abandoned, empty of its cribs and cots. All the Littles gone.

The feeling touched her then, a cold shiver from within: something was about to happen.

VI

THE NIGHT
OF BLADES
AND STARS

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say, “Behold!”
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion
.

—S
HAKESPEARE
,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream

THIRTY-FIVE

For ninety-two years, eight months, and twenty-six days, since the last bus had driven up the mountain, the souls of First Colony had lived in this manner:

Under the lights.

Under the One Law.

According to custom.

According to instinct.

In the day-to-day.

With only themselves, and those they had made, for company.

Under the protection of the Watch.

Under the authority of the Household.

Without the Army.

Without memory.

Without the world.

Without the stars.

For Auntie, alone in her house in the glade, the night—the Night of Blades and Stars—commenced like so many nights before it: she was sitting at the table in her steam-fogged kitchen, writing in her book. That afternoon she had taken a batch of pages off the line, stiff with the sun—they always felt to her like squares of captured sunlight—and had passed the remainder of the daylight hours preparing them: trimming the edge on her cutting board, opening the binding and its covers of stretched lambskin, carefully undoing the stitching that held the pages in place, taking up her needle and thread to sew the new ones in. It was slow work, satisfying in the way of all things that required time and concentration, and by the time she was finished, the lights were coming on.

Funny how everyone thought she had just the one book.

The volume she was writing in, by her closest recollection, was the twenty-seventh of its kind. It seemed she was always opening a drawer or stacking cups in a cabinet or sweeping under the bed and coming across another one. She supposed that was the reason she put them away like she did, here and there, not in a neat line on some shelf to look at. Whenever she found one, it felt like bumping into an old friend.

Most told the same stories. Stories she remembered of the world and how it was. Time to time a bit of something would sail out of the blue, a memory she’d forgotten she had, like television, and the silly things she used to watch (its flickering blue-green glow and her daddy’s voice:
Ida, turn that damn thing off, don’t you know it rots your brain?);
or something would set her off, the way a ray of sunshine drizzled over a leaf or a breeze with a certain smell in its currents, and the feelings would start to move through her, ghosts of the past. A day in a park in autumn and a fountain billowing water and the way the afternoon light seemed to catch in its spray, like a huge sparkling flower; her friend Sharise, the girl from down the corner, sitting beside her on a step to show her a tooth she’d lost, holding it with its bloody stump in her palm for Auntie to see.
(Ain’t no such thing as the tooth fairy, I know it, but she always brings me a dollar.)
Her mama folding laundry in the kitchen, wearing her favorite summer dress of pale green, and the puff of scent from the towel she was snapping and folding against her chest. When this happened, Auntie knew it would be a good night of writing, memories opening into other memories, like a hall of doors her mind could walk down, keeping her busy till the morning sun was rising in the windows.

But not tonight, thought Auntie, dipping the nib of her pen into the cup of ink and smoothing the page flat beneath her hand. Tonight was not a night for these old things. It was Peter she meant to write on. She expected he’d be along directly, this boy with the stars inside him.

Things came to her in their way. She supposed it was because she’d lived so long, like she was a book herself and the book was made of years. She remembered the night Prudence Jaxon had appeared at her door. The woman was sick with the cancer, well on her way, much before her time. Standing there in Auntie’s door with the box pressed to her chest, so brittle and thin it was like she could blow away in the wind. Auntie had seen it so many times in her life, this bad thing in the bones, and there was never any right thing to do except to listen and do like the person asked, and that was what Auntie did for Prudence Jaxon that night. She took the box and kept it safe, and it wasn’t but a month before Prudence Jaxon was dead.