You'll Like It Here (Everybody Does) (24 page)

“What happened?” Mom whispers, and touches her cheek. “I feel like I've fallen off the Empire State Building.”

“The what?” says Gil.

“Never mind. Where are the kids?”

“Everybody's here and safe,” Gil says.

She sits up, and this time Gil doesn't stop her. “Where are we?”

“Meggie figured the coordinates, Mom,” David says. “We're on our way to the Western Province.”

Mom looks at me. “Meggie?”

“Yeah, Mom. Now, don't get mad, but I studied the tutorial.”

“You used the Carriage computer!” she cries. “Without supervision?”

“Yeah, Mom. I know I wasn't supposed to, but I was bored, and … well, I did learn.”

Solemnly she studies my face for a long time. Then her face relaxes into a smile. “That's my Meggie. I always knew if things got too tough on the ground, you'd learn to fly.”

Sounds to me like a good slogan for life.

My eyes meet David's, and I find that he's smiling at me too. It hits me then that I've finally learned to do something my brother can't do. And the best part? He actually seems proud of me.

Gramps stirs, groans, and says, “Are we there yet?”

“But how did you do that, Meggie?” Mom asks me. “The tutorial's in Chromish. I know you can speak it, but you never learned to read it.”

“I think Dad taught me.”

“How is that possible? You were only three when he died.”

“I know,” I say, “but I remember certain things.”

In a little while Mom is able to stand, and everybody makes way for her to go to the control panel. I show her how I figured the coordinates, and she hugs me.

“I think you nailed it, sweetie,” she says.

“How do you feel, Mom?” David asks.

“Surprisingly good,” she answers. “I can speak okay, and I can move my jaw around without much pain.”

“But you had a pretty hard blow,” Gil says. “We're going to get you to a doctor as soon as possible.”

“I sure hope they have good doctors in this place we're going,” David says.

“Did you know,” Gramps says, sounding almost like himself again, “that the Carriage is designed to move in and out of dimensions in the blink of an eye? It's also able to find secret gateways, hidden passageways, and holes in space, so that it can travel more efficiently than any other vehicle in the universe.”

“That's right,” Mom adds, “and I don't know how long we'll be traveling this time, so what we need to do is record our memories in the Log, while they're fresh.”

She instructs David to find the Log in the storage compartment. He hands it to Mom, and she passes it to Gramps. “You'll have to do the honors,” she tells him, and touches her cheek. “I don't think I can handle it today.”

“Play some scenes from our Earth first, Gramps,” I suggest. “So Kitty can see what the Log does. She's the only one who hasn't heard it yet.”

As the images flow out and the mystic music, so like a pan flute, wafts around us, Kitty's face breaks into a huge grin.

“Wow!” is all she can say. “Wow!”

When we begin to record memories from Fashion
City, I'm not surprised that our friends have few good ones to save. Of course, the Gilmores lovingly store memories of the wife and mother who was taken from them. Then they move on to the singing nights, before and after the Blues came into their lives. They also save some touching moments from the years when Jennifer and Colin were little and they were as happy as a family could be under the circumstances.

Kitty wants to recall her grandmother, who died when she was small, and she wants to save memories of her mom teaching her to sew, and her dad reading with her. I start to remind her once again of a guy named Corey Marshall but think better of it. Maybe, if she wants to, she'll tell me about him later. After all, it was a secret between me and the other Kitty.

When everybody's finished recording, Kitty asks, “Now, where we goin' to?”

“You mean to say, ‘Where are we going?' ” Mom automatically corrects her. “You don't need to add the preposition
to
. It's not necessary.”

“Ohhh-kaaay.” Kitty lets that word come out low and slow, as she rolls her eyes at me.

“Don't mind Mom,” I tell her. “She can't help herself.”

“Oh, Kitty! I'm sorry,” Mom says. “I should never correct your manner of speaking. It's so uniquely you.”

“Lady, are you calling me grossly unique?” Kitty says, pretending to be offended.

“Yes, I am,” Mom shoots back. “And as Meggie will tell you, it's a compliment! In fact, each one of us is an
original, Kitty. We should celebrate our differences instead of discouraging them.”

“I'll second that!” Gramps agrees heartily. “And now we have to deprogram each other from all that brainwashing in Fashion City.”

He's being polite. What he means to say is that the
Gilmores
need deprogramming. They have come out of their fog, but it will take some time to remove all the conditioning from their heads.

“What's brainwashing?” Jennifer wants to know.

“It's what they did to us,” Gil explains, “to keep us in line.”

“That's right,” Mom adds. “If you hear something repeated often enough, you start believing it, even if it doesn't make sense. And if you happen to be taking a tranquilizer like Lotus, your mind will more easily succumb to suggestion.”

“Why so many wars?” Colin asks. “Surely they were not all justified.”

“Fortunes are made from wars,” Mom says. “And I'm quite sure the Fathers are also trying to expand their territory.”

“But people gave their lives!” Colin protests.

“Not the Fathers,” Mom says solemnly. “And not their children.”

We're quiet for a moment as we absorb the enormity and injustice of it all.

“What about the drabness?” I speak up after a while. “Why didn't they want bright colors?”

“Color can be stimulating,” Gramps the artiste
explains. “It can send the human imagination spinning into daydreams and fits of creativity. Good music inspires us in the same way.”

“And so does a good education,” Mom adds.

“And time?” I ask. “Why did we have no weeks or months or names of days? Only seasons.”

“The Fathers didn't want us measuring time,” Gramps says. “They encouraged us to live only for the moment—for that's all we had—to forget we were destined to be soldiers at sixteen, factory drones every day thereafter, and corpses at sixty-five. For the same reason, they wanted us always in a stupor. And the jobs were so monotonous that people learned to perform them even when they were spaced out.”

“We should now observe a moment of silence,” Mom says soberly, “for all those poor souls who are not as lucky as we are and have no means of escaping the Land of the Fathers.”

When the moment passes, Kitty says to me a bit sadly, “Did you know it was my grandpa who turned me in?”

“Yeah, we heard that on
The Family Hour
,” I say. “But you know what, Kitty? You can borrow my grandpa now.”

She smiles. “Yeah, he already told me to call him Gramps.”

“Everybody does,” I say.

“So we're really going to the Western Province?” Kitty asks Mom.

“Yes!” Mom replies. “And I promise you they don't eat rats. But that's a good example of Fashion City propaganda. We believe the Western Province is a good place,
and we hope to settle down there in a home of our own. Do you want to live with us, Kitty?”

“Yeah, I'd like that,” she says, almost in a whisper.

“Now that everybody here knows the truth about the Blues,” Mom says, “I have to ask you to keep our secret, at least until we learn more about the people in the Western Province.”

“Of course,” Gil agrees. “The kids and I have discussed it already.”

“I won't tell,” Kitty says. “Who would believe me?”

“Well, that's the last time I'll go on vacation,” Gramps says. “When I left, the plan was to go to a planet called Tranquility.”

“It's a long story, Gramps,” David tells him. “And we'll tell it to you later.”

“What can we do to help the people in Fashion City?” Kitty asks.

“When we're settled,” Mom says, “we'll help the Resistance through their contacts in the Western Province.”

“Can't we use this flying thing to get some of them out of there?” Kitty asks.

“Good idea,” David says, “and I bet you'd fly out your cousin Emma first.”

“You know her?” Kitty says.

“I met your uncle Ethan,” David says. “I'll tell you all about it sometime.”

“Yeah, I would definitely save Emma and her whole family,” Kitty says.

“I'd rescue Elvis” comes from Gramps.

“Bonnie,” from Colin. “She saved my hide.”

“Lewis Jones,” Gil says, “among other friends and relatives.”

“A kid named Jeremy,” David says.

“I'd save Alison Fink and L. Frank Baum,” I say, “and their families too, of course.”

At that moment we come to a sudden but smooth landing. When the vapor clears, we look out upon the land. We are on a hillside overlooking a valley. Down there we can see a small village—a school, a church steeple, rows of houses and barns, cars in driveways, dogs playing on a green lawn, and blue hills in the distance.

It looks like home.

Ruth White, author of the Newbery Honor Book
Belle Prater's Boy
, has written eleven books, most of them set in the Virginia mountains, where she grew up. In high school she watched television shows that took her far away from home, fueling her imagination. Ruth was fascinated with anything mysterious and eerie, such as
The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits
, and
Star Trek
.

Ruth says: “One thing I liked about
The Twilight Zone
was its trick of misleading the viewer into thinking something was a certain way; then you found out through a sudden twist that things were totally different from what you were led to believe. I wanted to use that kind of twist in a story of my own, with young adults as the main characters in an oppressive society where it was a crime to be unique—a place where people were brainwashed through the media. This book is unlike anything else I've written.”

While Ruth White's story takes place in another world, she happily resides on our planet, in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania.