Part II: Time Passes Irrevocably.
BEGIN:
YEAR 25
Grace
I don’t remember the world before this, because I was born in the fourth year after the Landing, and The Red Anarchy fell shortly before the third year. Even if I had been born say, in the first year, I doubt I would remember the peace that preceded the Fall, but I can guarantee you I would have remembered the Fall, itself. A very wise person once told me that we rarely remember the good that precedes the bad, because the bad, like a cancer, eats all that was good, because it knows the good can save us.
By now, you know who that very wise person is.
My parents told me in whispers stories of King Adam’s reign. They were Earthean, and when the Almighty Split had occurred at the campsite, when a man named Daniel Olivier had lost control of the survivors of Earth, they had almost followed the kindly married couple who swore that God would protect them. My mother had been a Christian on Earth, not one of the judgmental ones who quoted Scripture verbatim correctly but missed the overall meaning of the passages. She could quote Scripture if she so chose, which saved her when the Red Anarchy fell, but her first husband could not. She could never tell me what had happened to him, and honestly, I was always too afraid to know, though my mind that loved to churn out terrible scenarios certainly supplied enough to speculate the cause of his death. Sometimes, though, I could imagine him as a rebel fighter, one who rose up against the Old Spirits in the first year of their tyrannical regime and died for the cause.
Mom and Dad told me that King Adam’s reign was not perfect, but that it was free. As I got older, they told me just how far that freedom went, but I was not shocked nor was I repulsed, though I should have been. If I wanted to survive, I should have forced myself to feel some level of disgust towards the people who took their freedom too far, but I could not do it, no matter how hard I tried. I just couldn’t shake the craving within me for that freedom. To me, the idea of infinite liberty was like a spot of freshwater amongst an ocean of salt, and all the while I relished that idea even though I had never known it.
Perhaps if they had been less lascivious in their freedom they might have kept it. The One God would not have taken it away. But then, that is probably Old Spirit reasoning, and I should not allow it. When I was younger, and I would be released from school, and all the math that was far too simple (I could run calculations in my head with letters in place of numbers and with strange symbols I had seen in an old textbook my teacher, Mrs. Rose, kept locked away in a secret compartment under her desk, symbols that looked like this ∆ ∞ ∫, among many others) and the writing prompts that required us to summarize passages from the Light Texts or write what gifts from the One God we were most thankful for had fled from my mind, I would lie under my favorite tree, the old Oak that stood taller than all the other trees around it, and dream for hours what I would do if I had infinite freedom. All of my speculations were rather boring: I would read every day books that my mother had told me about, books that supposedly still existed in the free cities of Purissimus. I would travel away from my small village, I would fight the Unallied and the Rebel Red, if they tried to stop me, and I would see the amazing beauty of this land, the danger of it, the darkness… The world was vast, Dad said. He would show me a map he used in his job, and as a child, the size of our world had boggled my mind. Even as a teenager, it had boggled my mind. How could I live in this one tiny village, in this insignificant part of the world? How could I never see anything else but this? Dad told me that both on Earth and on Purissimus, kids left home to see the cities, to explore the world, to go to school in other places. Hearing about that made my heart throb with the excitement of infinite promise, of infinite possibilities. But, of course, that excitement gave way to sadness, because I would never experience what he said; girls like me were not allowed to leave unless we were accompanied by our husbands.
That little issue is what got me into trouble in the first place. I was sixteen, of marrying age, and Mary Bachum, the Living Saint, was in charge of finding me a suitable husband. She decided on a man who was physically twenty-three (and honestly, he was very attractive, with the most amazing eyes I had ever seen) but he was forty-eight in actuality, which, sure, it could have been worse, because girls my age were married off to men who were physically forty-eight and like, one hundred in actuality, but when I looked into his amazing eyes at our First Meeting, I could not shake this trembling in my chest that was both my heart beating irregularly (and not in a good way) but also some writhing feeling of anxiety that was provoked by knowing he was not a good man. My mom and dad talked in hushed whispers, and I heard my dad use the words “betrayed” and “traitor” multiple times. I heard my mom say that maybe Adam had put him there. That was all I needed to hear to make the connection that the man I was supposed to marry was King Adam’s son, and he had betrayed his father to join up with the Old Spirits. Plus, of course, King Adam’s green eyes were legendary, and my prospective husband’s eyes had to have come from someone. Still, I felt bad for King Adam with his green eyes, though I never pledged any fealty to him or anything. My parents told me when I was old enough to keep it a secret that they would always be Red Anarchists, and they would always be loyal, mostly to the First Queen, but also to the King. I knew very little about the First Queen then, because apparently, since King Adam was no longer King of anything, they still counted his first wife as Queen, except she was not the First Queen, and his second wife, who was the First Queen, was talked about so little that there was no possible way that I could have known about her.
“What was her name?” I had asked my mom once, and I could have sworn that her eyes were tearing when she lied and said she didn’t remember.
“Did you know her?” I had asked.
“Yes.”
That my mother could not lie about. She could not deny that she had known this Queen.
“What was she like?”
“Brilliant. Beautiful. Deadly, completely deadly. But only when those she loved were threatened, and she loved all of us.”
“Is she alive?”
Now, I heard the emotion. I heard the tears in her voice that I had thought had been in her eyes.
“I don’t know, baby. But she gave me a gift once, and it was the greatest gift of any.”
“Rachel.” My dad had said softly, and when we both looked, we saw him standing in the doorway of my room. “That’s enough.”
“You’re right, sweetheart.” She had replied, and that had been the end of our one and only conversation about the brilliant, beautiful, completely deadly Queen Whomever. But even that short conversation, even that slight display of emotion that my mother had shown, coupled with my father’s soft, equally emotional command to put an abrupt end to the conversation, elevated this Queen Whomever to a status of an epic heroine in my mind. I pictured a beautiful brunette woman in her forties, and for some reason, she was wearing golden horns and carrying a brutal-looking yet elegant blade. Don’t ask me why, but that was my picture of her.
My parents tried to keep me shielded from the cruelty of the Old Spirit reign, and they were quite good at it. My dad was fully Redeemed from something (but I didn’t know what), so he held a rather good job with the Old Spirits. I never really knew quite what he did, but almost everyone treated him with respect.
“It’s almost like they don’t remember.” I had overheard him tell my mother one night after I had gone to bed.
“You’re doing so well, Tom. Just don’t think about it.”
“I always think about it. I think about the time we spent together on Earth. I think about the wedding, with everyone there, with Adam officiating… It’s who I am, Rachel.”
“I know. I know, sweetheart.” Her voice was always choked with emotion during those conversations, “And when the world is right again, you can be you again. If that person is alive, you can be together, right?”
“I sometimes wonder if we should have just stayed
on Earth.”
“Don’t say that!”
“We would have died together, and we never would have had to compromise for these lunatics.”
“I know, but we have Gracie now. We have our daughter, and…”
“And she is everything. I know, Rachel. I would want to die if I didn’t have her and you and his mother. My mother.”
“And we would die without you. So, stop. Okay? Just stop.”
My parents spoke of serious things when they thought I was asleep. Little did they know, I stayed awake so I could hear their mysterious conversations of which I could never make heads or tails. I could never decipher even the smallest of secrets, because they talked in riddles and fragmented sentences. They could do that because they knew the secrets in full, because they had lived through the times they were discussing and remembered them perfectly. Their memories were linked; their minds were bound together. In that way, my parents were always intimately connected. But one thing that I had noticed as I got older was that besides holding hands or putting their arms around each other’s shoulders, they did not touch. I never saw them kiss. I chalked that up to the fact that their marriage had been arranged, and I never let it bother me because it was obvious that they loved each other. But I had no idea if that love was romantic, or if it was simply love between two people who had been thrown together by less than ideal circumstances and took comfort in one another because they shared a joint vision of the freedom that they had actually enjoyed in the past. It didn’t bother me, because what did it matter? I just found it curious.
So, my own marriage was coming around the bend, and when they thought I could not, I heard them both crying softly. Adam’s son traveled all over the world, so they would not see me. I cried, too, thinking of it. I could not fathom not seeing my mom and dad every day. I could not fathom not going to school with Mrs. Rose, whom my father took care of like she was his own mother, whom my mother confided in even more so than she confided in my dad. I could not fathom leaving my old Oak tree. I had dreamed of leaving that little village, but now, as I faced the prospect of that departure, I realized that it meant nothing. It held no magic at all, if I had to go alone, or rather, in the company of this bad man. It meant nothing if my family was left behind.
But instead of crying as most young girls did before their wedding, I went to my mother and father and said that I wanted to run away. Immediately, after the words had left my mouth, they looked around frantically to make sure no one was listening, even though we were alone in our house. They had been thinking it, I knew they had been. They wanted to run away with me so I would not have to marry the bad man. Never once did they try to argue against it. Instead, we did try to run.
And all that matters is that we were caught, we were separated, and I was given the choice of public whipping in the village square, death by hanging, or fifty years aboard the notorious prison ship, Lapsarian, and my mother and father were sentenced to death. Believe me, of the three choices, I considered the second, because like there was no point in leaving the village if my family was not with me, there was no point to my life if they were not in it. They allowed my mother to see me, and she was not afraid, which gave me the confidence to choose death. But what she told me gave me pause.
“You were born for a reason, Gracie.” She said, “You were given to me because your father and I couldn’t make you on our own. You were born from me.” She said, because I had just been about to ask that question, “But you were given to me. Your life…” Tears were falling from her eyes now, “…has so much purpose, Gracie. You have a destiny.”
She would not tell me what it was, nor would she explain any further. She just held me tightly, whispered that there were people onboard the ship who would always look after me, told me that I was everything to her and Dad, that they loved me so much, and then, they led her from my cell to the gallows, and I cried harder than I had ever cried in my life. Through my tears, I said I chose the Lapsarian, though I just wanted to die.
Life is meaningless without those we love.