Brave New Love (30 page)

Everybody else was probably where they belonged. Lunch chime wouldn’t sound for another hour, and everyone had work to do.

I snuck past the community hall—a tall, round structure built of carved stone in the center of the cavern—crossed Echo River on the stone bridge, and made it to the puter room, one
of many smaller caves carved into the wall of the living cavern, without running into anyone. I was happy to open the door into warmth and light, and the sharp smell of electricity. The puter room
was my safe haven.

Noel nodded as I joined him in front of the consoles of the three puters he kept up and running. He had four backups that worked, and the corpses of six others that had died but could be
dissected for replacement parts. The storage cave next to the puter room was full of equipment that didn’t work anymore. We had paper schematics for some of it, and sometimes we tried to
repair things.

We still had some working comm units, and Noel had three cameras. Sometimes he let me use one of them, but he always supervized. One of his previous apprentices had broken a lens and killed an
earlier camera, so he was hyper-scared about the few that were left. We had a whole cupboard full of nonworking cameras, all sorts, tiny and big ones.

Maryam, one of the littlers, was sitting at the third console, poking at keys and studying the screen. She was one of my trainees. All four of us middler puter girls had our own littler
trainees. I’d shown Maryam all kinds of things at the console, but she couldn’t seem to get the hang of the reading part. She could play the games where she moved colored things around
and made explosions, but she couldn’t read yet, and she was already seven.

All the littlers had trouble reading.

Of the middlers, I could read, and Fingal, and the other puter girls could, too. Arn couldn’t think hard enough to get a letter in his head, let alone a number. Two of the other girls
around my age could say the names of letters but couldn’t seem to get them when they were put together into words, and one of the boys besides Arn was basically hopeless, but he was really
good with machines, so it didn’t matter.

“Where’d you go, Daina?” Maryam asked me.

“Waste pit,” I said.

She pinched her lips, poked a key combination, and made a big analog clock face show up on her screen. She touched the three, then dragged her fingertip along the lower curve of the clock to the
nine, where the big hand rested now. “That’s a long loop of time for the waste pit,” she said.

Noel said, “Maryam, that’s wonderful! When did you learn to see time on a clock?”

She smiled at him, eyes bright with the screen’s reflection. “I watched during the drills.”

Noel often set his students to timed drills, bringing up the clock face on one screen while he challenged us to type a piece of text at the other two consoles within a certain period of time.
Our littlers watched us drill sometimes.

“Good watching, Maryam! That loop of time is called ‘half an hour.’ ”

“I know that one! That’s what the carers tell us at the crêche when we ask for a story before sleep. Half an hour of story!”

“What about this loop?” Noel leaned forward and traced the arc of the clock from nine over the top to three.

Maryam frowned at the screen.

Happy that Noel had successfully distracted her, I sat down at my usual console and brought up the spreadsheet for crops planted thirty days earlier. The corn had been in the ground that long.
Piller was supposed to give us measurements every ten days so we could see if things were growing as well as they had last time and the time before and the time before. The data fields for height
were empty. Piller had been getting more and more irritated by Noel’s requests for information. He told Noel: “I’ll tell you if it doesn’t grow. If it does, who cares how
tall it is?”

He had been angry at Noel’s request for an accurate count on the crops harvested, too. Maybe because he didn’t want to admit the vines and stalks were growing slower, bearing less,
their fruits and seeds smaller.

I switched to the Na Below mating map. There were four fertile women left in the colony, and all eight of us middler girls, presumed fertile until proven not. Each of us middler girls was
matched first with whoever was farthest kin. We were supposed to work on getting babies as soon as we turned fifteen. Once we had our first babies, and them grown a year, the next decision would be
made about who our second mates would be. If the first babies were normal, we’d be matched back to their fathers. If they came out twisty, we’d be matched with others.

Noel was my father. Leader Bufo was my uncle. Piller was a distant cousin, farther than the other men genetically from me.

I liked Matt, chief baker, of the other adult men, but he was my uncle, too. Taboo forbade me from going with him, at least for my first baby.

Taboo was going to take a beating soon, we were so few.

Of the five boys, Fingal and Arn had been sterilized early in life. Revi the doctor had known Fingal was different, a mutant, of course, from the minute he was born. Anyone could tell by looking
at him. Anyone who deviated from human normal was sterilized early, by order of Prophet Silas.

That was a stupid rule. Fingal was better at a lot of things than the other boys and men. His mutations were positive ones. He was smarter than the other boy middlers, too. No trouble reading or
working numbers. We’d be lucky to have more like him. We learned that too late.

Arn had taken longer to diagnose. He was slow to learn. The council had made the decision to keep him from fathering.

One of the other boys was Noel’s get, my biological brother; the other two were Bufo’s get, close cousins.

Piller. My mate. My fate.

I had seen the backs of women who had borne his children: striped with strikes from his walking stick.

Noel gripped my shoulder. I hit a key to hide the mating map, but I knew he’d already seen it.

“Time to contact Geordie,” Noel said.

“Yay” Maryam jumped up from her console and danced in a tight circle behind me. “Yay!”

I glanced at the clock in the upper right corner of my screen. Noel was right: half an hour until lunch chime.

We moved to the radio corner of the puter room, and Noel let me switch on and tune in.

Following Weatherdeath, we used to get signals from six other Below groups. Everybody had agreed to contact each other once a week as long as possible. My mother had told me about how, when she
was a little girl, everybody would gather in the community hall to listen to the broadcasts from other people beyond our cavern walls. When Ma was little, we had still been in touch with three
other settlements, but we lost touch with Chi Below and Sa Below. Only Yup Below kept our radio dates any longer.

Geordie was our contact at Yup Below. He gave us all the news. I felt as though I knew them at Yup Below, and of everybody I knew in the world, the one I most wanted to meet and maybe mate with
was Geordie. He had a soft, deep voice, and an accent no one in Na Below had. He sounded blurry but kind.

“Testing, you Na-folk, testing,” his voice said as I tuned. I cranked the tuning knob back so his voice was true instead of thin and strained through the speaker.

I pressed the transmit button. “We hear you, Geordie. Hello!”

“There’s my Daina-lassie,” he said. “To whom else am I talking this fine underground day?”

“Noel’s here, and Maryam,” I said.

“Greetings, Na-folk! What news?”

“Nobody’s pregnant,” I said. “One of the generators is coughing. Lights are flickering in Plantlands. What’s happening in Yup?”

“Alas to that generator situation! Hope you can fix it! Dearie me on the lights. I hope it’s not dire. We have a new life in Yup Below,” Geordie said. “Sergeant Flynn had
a baby boy. She named him Jupiter.”

“Congratulations!” we all yelled.

“Ouch, my ears! Well, she heard that up in the hospital, I have no doubt.” Geordie laughed. I loved his laugh. “How’s supplies holding out, eh?”

“Still living off new crops and storing reserves. Did any of your wheat sprout?”

“Had a bit of success there, with the seeds we treated. Private Gina’s nursing them along. My son wants to eat the little sprouts, that juicy they look! I would like to eat them
myself if I didn’t know how much we need them grown. His mum got hold of an old pacifier from somewhere—can you picture that? We thought they’d all rotted. Any road, it did the
job and stopped him nibbling on the greenery.”

Noel leaned in and pressed the transmit button. “What did you treat your seeds with?”

“Touch of potash! Willy-lad went spelunking about in the unexplored tunnels off our hydroponics cave, and what should he stumble across but an old campsite. Not mapped, that, but someone
had sealed the exit to the Up at some point. Still, he found some old campfire rings, and packed the charcoal back. Major Lewis had a survival book with a bit in it about how to leach ashes, and we
tried it. Worked a treat.”

“Thanks for that,” Noel said.

“Sure enough,” said Geordie. “Put my dearie back on. Daina-love, when are you dropping by for a visit?”

I wished there was a way I could tunnel to where Geordie’s caverns were. Sometimes I got heartsick with longing to see him. I felt all hollow and sad and didn’t even want to eat.

Maryam pressed the button. “Never mind Daina,” she said. “I’ll come visit you, Captain Geordie! Will you give me tea?”

“Mary-me-lass, of course I will, and biscuits too. Drop by anytime.”

“I will. I’ll come tomorrow.”

Lunch chime sounded.

“Geordie, time for us to sign off. Stay well, will you?” Noel said.

“Aye-aye, sir,” Geordie said. “Give all your folks our best.”

“To you as well.” Noel shut down the radio.

Maryam shoved out of the room ahead of us. Noel touched my arm before I could follow. I stood in the doorway to the puter room, watching Maryam dash through the dimness of the living cavern
toward the lighted community hall. I waited for Noel to speak.

He came up behind me, a warmth and a breathing presence, taller than I was, with a scent of soap and sweat. “Where did you go this time?” he murmured when Maryam was beyond
earshot.

“To Plantlands. To look at Piller,” I whispered. I didn’t get to sneak away often during work hours. Usually the other puter girls were there. They tattled on me if I
misbehaved. Noel never betrayed me, but I wasn’t sure whether Maryam would keep quiet.

He touched my shoulder. “The act itself can be over quickly. You won’t have to endure it for long.”

“It’s not just the act. I’ve heard the women talk.” Two of the crêche carers had children by Piller, and another had lain with him when I was ten. Day after day she
had come to work stiff and sore, with marks and bruises on her back and arms. The other women had salved her wounds and taken over her work. Finally, Revi had pronounced her barren. The
crêche carers had celebrated with tiny tots of forbidden drink and stolen strawberries for each of us littlers.

Noel said nothing.

Revi had invited me to attend a birthing three years earlier. Mother and child had died. Before she died, the mother had screamed and sobbed and muttered about Piller. She had strike scars on
her shoulders from his walking stick. She had not wanted to live. “If my child is a boy, he is cursed. I don’t want to see him become a man like his father. If my child is a girl, she
is cursed to live as I have. If my child is lucky, she will die before she’s born,” she had whispered after hours of labor.

Revi had tried to send me away, but I wouldn’t leave. The woman had been one of my favorite teachers in the crêche, and I had wanted to help her. I washed sweat off her face, and
tried to soothe her when she screamed and all the veins stood out in her forehead and neck. I gave her water between her pains, when she would let me. I held her hand. She gripped me so tightly a
bone broke in my hand. Revi set it. It healed, but my memory was scarred.

Blood had gushed from my teacher. She had died before the baby made it out, and Revi cut into her, trying to save the baby, but it died, too. By the time it was over we were all stained red and
smelled of metal and death.

I never, ever, ever wanted to give birth.

It was a woman’s most important job. We had to keep our kind alive. What kind of world would it be if we all died out, our memories and monuments ground to dust and covered over? Thousands
of years of human history wiped out by weather. It must not happen. So we’d been taught from birth.

•  •  •

Fingal sat beside me at lunch, with Arn on his other side. Granny Tordis brought around a pot of porridge and ladled it into people’s bowls.

The community hall had been built to hold hundreds. It was too big to heat, so everyone wore cloaks or jackets over their bodysuits during meals. The tables were shaped in arcs. When we fitted
them together, they made a circle where all our diminished numbers could sit, facing each other. The circle was close to the kitchen doors so the servers didn’t have far to go. Around us in
every other direction stretched silent, dark space, its far edges cluttered with furniture we didn’t need and anything else useful left from the times of more. Each time we lost someone,
someone would go to their home cave and clear out their belongings to add to the store here.

When I was a littler, sometimes the crêche carers brought us here to rummage through things stacked in the dark. We built our own caves with blankets spread over old tables and chairs.
Sometimes we found treasures. Other times we found old, worn things to feed to the pulpers and be made into new things.

I glanced toward the shadows. Even back then I had been looking for places to hide, but Piller had grown up here, too, and explored, and he knew all the hiding places.

“Are you all right?” I asked Fingal when I had eaten half my porridge.

“What do you mean?”

“I saw him strike you,” I whispered. I touched his leg, then looked over my shoulder. My biological mother sat next to me. She had been one of my carers, though I hadn’t known
we were such close kin when I was a littler. We lived together now.