Brave New Love (31 page)

She was talking to Noel. Good.

“What were you doing in Plantlands?” Fingal muttered.

“Spying.” He should have known. I was always spying.

“Daina. If anyone catches you, they’ll put you down the well.”

“I know. I can’t help it.” The well was cold and dank, the walls slick with moisture, unclimbable. I had been there many times. You waited in utter darkness for someone to let
you out, learning each time that you were totally dependent on the others in the community. They always said, “We have nothing but each other, we are nothing without each other,” when
they came to let me out, and I had to say it back to them before they’d lower the ladder.

I had taught myself to tell stories in the darkness. It no longer froze me with fear.

Leader Bufo stood up and rang the attention chime. All conversation stopped. “Noel. Any news from Yup Below today?”

“Another life has been added to their community,” Noel said, “a boy named Jupiter.”

Some people cheered. Other people muttered. We’d had no live births in four years. My teacher’s death, with her baby, had killed our hope. No other grownup woman had gotten pregnant
since, though not from lack of trying, if the whispers were true. The men muttered about that, and the women muttered about the men.

Three of us middler girls would be turning into grownups in the next month, and Piller had first chance at us all. His children were strong and healthy. One of the middler boys would be old
enough to father, but he’d try first with a grownup woman.

“Captain Geordie said they’d quickened some wheat seed using potash,” Noel said.

A discussion broke out about that. Our wheat had been sickly lately.

After a time, Piller rose, lifting his hand. Leader Bufo sounded the attention chime again.

“Three of our grow lights have gone out,” Piller said into the silence, “and we have no more replacement bulbs.”

Everyone burst into speech.

Arn leaned in front of Fingal, toward me. “He hit us.”

“He hit you, too, Arn?” I asked. Arn almost never spoke aloud. Most of the middlers mocked him when he did, because he slurred. Today he spoke clearly, though.

“Aum. When the light went out. He knocked me down, and Fin too, and then the girls. He made us spill.”

“If we have no light,” Piller called over our anxious voices, “it won’t matter if we know some stupid trick with ash.”

The grownups opted to spend the afternoon discussing the situation. The rest of us went back to work.

•  •  •

After lunch, all the middlers went on energy shift. We went to Plantlands, where one field had been set aside with stationary bikes we could pedal to store energy in batteries.
Plantlight shone on us for two hours while we cycled. Prophet Silas had decreed that everybody needed two hours of plantlight a day. We had to work for it, except the babies and the crêche
carers, who sat near the cycles as we pedaled and shared the light we produced.

One of the lights had died over the cycles. I sat on one in the shadow spot, with harsh light shining down on the others around me.

“You’ll get sick,” one of the other girls told me. There were plenty of bicycles in the light.

“This one actually works,” I said. Some of the bikes weren’t connected to batteries anymore. People usually picked those because they were easier to pedal.

She shrugged. The start chime sounded, and one of the carers beat spoons on a pot in rhythm to keep us pedaling fast enough.

Fingal had picked a bike near mine. I didn’t like talking on the bikes because the others were too close to us, and several of them liked tattling, as though it made them safer from
shame-standing and the well if they put somebody else there.

Fingal had to hunch to fit into the bike’s saddle. His knees stuck up almost to his shoulders when he reached the top of his pedaling cycle. People had laughed the first time he got on a
bike, until someone noticed his energy monitor, which showed he had stored more than any of the rest of us.

I was so angry that Revi had sterilized him. He was as distant a cousin as Piller was. If I were going to have to have a baby, I would prefer—

Of course, that didn’t matter. All Fingal’s future selves were gone.

Geordie. Somewhere out there, beyond the Up . . .

•  •  •

At supper, Leader Bufo announced the grownups had decided someone needed to go to the Up and find out whether it had settled down enough that we could use sunlight for
farming.

“It’s a risky task,” Bufo said. “We haven’t opened the doors in a hundred years, and we don’t know if the plagues are still there, whether animals lie in
wait, or even feral people. None of us have combat training. We all know what happened when Chi and Sa and Oss and Con went to the Up. Or rather, we don’t know—we never heard from them
again.

“Without explorers,” he continued, “we may not survive. Will anyone volunteer to go?”

Fingal stood immediately, with Arn just after. “I would be glad to go,” said Fingal. Arn nodded.

My heartbeat speeded.

“Thank you, Fingal. Your willingness is appreciated,” said Bufo.

“A grownup must go, too,” Ma said.

Discussion broke out. I sat back, my hands gripping my thighs, as people discussed the risks. Arn and Fingal would never get children. They did jobs valuable to the community, but others knew
their work as well as they did. Any grownups with genes to donate should be exempt from a trip to the Up. We needed to hoard all the genes we could if we wanted our kind to have a future.

Fingal. Of course he would volunteer. Maybe I had known that.

“I’ll go,” said Granny Tordis. She had been barren a long time. My mother was her last child. Granny ran our food preparation, but she had apprentices who could fill in.

“We accept your sacrifice,” Bufo said before anybody even discussed it.

“I’ll go, too,” I said. A tiny knot of heat was burning in my chest, a hard, hot spot of hope and fear and wonder, wrapped in satisfaction because finally, finally, my small
collection of sneaky secrets had nudged a possibility into being.

“Daina,” Bufo said, “you can’t go. We need your mothering. We need your potential and skills. We can’t risk your loss.”

“Who’s going to keep communication open with the Up if I don’t go?” I asked. I had trained with the comm units, and none of the other middlers had. “What’s
the point in going to the Up if we can’t tell you what we find there? You have seven other middler mothers.” I pointed to the other girls around my age. “I’ll go.”

“We’ll sleep on it,” Bufo said. “More talk at breakfast.”

•  •  •

After the meeting, we skipped the evening music. Ma and I went to our cave.

When Rose was caring for me and the others in the crêche, I hadn’t known she was my bio mother, but I had liked her best of all the carers, and she had whispered to me that I was her
favorite, too, even when I got in trouble for wanting more than my due, or reading too long, or stealing, or breaking something because I wanted to find out how it worked. When I turned twelve and
could have picked a cave of my own, I moved in with Ma Rose instead.

Ma had a lot of hidden thoughts, and when we went to our cave for the night, she sometimes told me what they were.

She tapped one light on, a soft yellow glow, making landscapes of the mounded pillows and thrown-aside covers in our sleep nests. Her clothes rod held four soft-green pulp coveralls. Mine held
two, one light blue, and the other pink. I wore my third, which was yellow. They would be recycled when they were worn out, but I couldn’t get any more until I’d worn through these,
because I was still growing.

I headed for my nest of green and blue and pale yellow pillows, and the pale spinner-silk sheets bunched at the end. Some of my pillows had embroidered pictures on them. I hugged the pillow with
the picture of pets on it that Fingal had made for me during story time. We used to spend some of our puter-learn time looking at images of olden days. We saw long-ago people with strange animals
snuggled against them. Fur. Textures I had never touched. Fingal had made me a pillow with a dog and a cat on it. The floss he had used was soft. Touching his gift, I almost touched him.

Ma stood in the cave entrance and stared toward the bubbles of downtown buildings, where some glows stayed lit when most people slept. Most of us were on the same sleep-wake cycle. The cavern
was vast with darkness, big with moving air and the rush of the river. It was always like that when we stopped making noise for the day. I liked the feel of the soft cool air, the sound of nearby
moving water, the clean scent of stone. Comfort. Home. My feet knew the paths. My skin knew air. I didn’t want to leave what I knew and trusted. I couldn’t stay, because the future
promised to be different.

There was a sealed room at one end of the cavern with a glass rod that went all the way to the Up, and we watched the light that came down it to see when day was. The settlement calendar and
clock was set by the rod. Only three grownups worked during sleep, preparing supplies for the day-users.

After Ma closed the door for the night, I asked, “Why did you want a grownup to go to the Up with Fingal and Arn?” I always wanted to know what Ma’s hidden thoughts were. She
thought wider than anybody else in our Below, including Noel and Bufo.

Ma fluffed the covers on her bed nest. The colors of her pillows and sheets were darker than mine: blues called midnight and purples called indigo. “Brush your teeth,” she said.

I went to the wash-and-waste alcove, scrubbed my teeth with reclaimed salt, rinsed my mouth, then spat into the recycle bowl. I returned to my sleep nest, fluffed my covers, and settled.
“Why not let them go by themselves?” I asked again. Sometimes Ma wouldn’t tell me her thoughts, but sometimes, if I kept after her, she would.

“We have not treated Fingal and Arn well,” she said. “I don’t know why they’d tell us what they find once they get to the Up. If I were Fingal, I’d go to the
Up and keep moving. If I were Arn, I’d follow Fingal wherever he went. We would be worse off than we are now if we lose those two. Someone has to watch them and keep them to task and bring
them home after. Granny can do it. She taught them at school. They’re used to obeying her . . . Daina, you must not go to the Up.”

“My reasons make sense,” I said.

“Yes, they do.” Ma sat silent, then reached over to tap the light off, leaving us in utter darkness, with only the sound of our breathing to keep us company. “That is not
enough,” she said. “You should wait until they come back and report. Make sure we can breathe naked Up air and not sicken from Up microbes or be attacked by Up creatures. You do not
need to be in the disposable first mission.”

“I want to see everything before anyone else spoils it with telling it wrong,” I said. “I want to tell Geordie what I see! I wonder if Yup Below has the same things above.
Maybe not! I want to know, Ma, you know I do. Plus, I can use a camera, and the others can’t.” My words dropped into the darkness. With Noel supervizing, I had taken pictures of
everyone at work, and some of people at rest, when the music and stories came out. My pictures were in our records, documenting our days. Noel said I had a good eye.

Ma sighed and didn’t say anything else.

She watched everything. She had deep thoughts. Maybe she knew what my real reasons were.

•  •  •

In the morning, we all met for breakfast in the community hall. Everyone was there, even the littlest littlers, sitting on crêche-carer laps. Granny Tordis had made the
porridge special, with diced bits of dried strawberry, and faint traces of cinnamon. I thought we had run out of that spice two years earlier. It was like a farewell breakfast, I thought, but
didn’t say.

Leader Bufo let us eat for a little while, then rose. He didn’t need to use the attention chime; everybody had been waiting for him to speak. “I have considered, and I approve Daina
going with Fingal, Arn, and Tordis on this voyage to the Up.”

The small hot knot in my chest that had been burning since the night before burst, and warmth flowed through me.

“I’ve printed out a map of what used to be Up before Weatherdeath,” Noel said. He laid out a big piece of paper on the table in front of Bufo. Fingal, Arn, Granny Tordis, and I
went to look at it. Noel said, “Probably all this is different now, but maybe some is the same. Daina, you’ve studied map reading.”

“Yes.” The map showed our cavern’s entrance, and the land laid out around it. Brown lines on green background, with two blue river lines running through. Mountainy things, if
the brown lines were outlining stuff. I saw hearts and hands in some of the lines where they ran close to each other, and I tried to make it into a picture of ground, but I couldn’t quite
force it into an image. We had ups and downs in our caverns, open spaces and narrow, twisty paths between walls that wanted to squeeze you, and lots and lots of stalactites reaching down and
stalagmites reaching up. We had flowstone draperies and beds of cave pearls. We had a river that rushed in from one side of the cavern and out through another, and we had our own structures and
caves in the walls and paths and railings. I had never seen a map of that. But I had looked at maps of the Up. Not to say I had ever understood what I was seeing.

“I packed us survival kits,” Granny Tordis said. “Food, water, matches, knives, tarps and lines and tape. A blanket in each, and a jacket, too. Extra socks. Flashlights. Soap,
lotion, tooth salt and brush, medical supplies.” She handed out stuffed backpacks, and we buckled ourselves into them.

“Daina. Here’s a comm unit and one of the cameras, and some charged batteries.” Noel gave me a padded black bag with compartments in it that held my devices snug. He buckled a
watch around my wrist, then showed me he had a watch around his own, and a matching comm unit. “Check in with me every hour on the hour, all right? At least to start. Let us know what’s
going on. I’ll have my unit on all the time until we know you’re somewhat safe. Tell us everything you can.”

“Thanks, Noel.” I kissed his cheek.