Jonathan sits on my right today. He’s fourteen, Jerry and Miriam’s first child, and inbreeding has shown no deleterious effects in him. He is in every way his father’s son, even to Jerry’s tendency to naiveté and his intrinsic dependability. And like Jerry, Jonathan isn’t particularly good at reading and verbalization; his forte is mathematics, and in that he’ll soon surpass me.
Isaac sits next to Jonathan, his half-brother. My sweet Isaac with his asthma and club foot. He’s a little slow mentally, and I don’t expect much of him in school. I’m just glad to have him here, this loving, fey child. He teaches me, I think, more than I can teach him.
On my left, Stephen occupies his usual seat. My scholar, my hope for the future of humankind—or this small colony of humankind. He is also the family’s hope genetically. His father was an Arkite, so he carries neither Miriam’s nor Jerry’s genes. All the other children do, and sooner or later, that will cause problems.
But sooner or later, this colony will find other survivors or be found by them. That’s inevitable. And necessary, although I wonder if the family will survive discovery intact. Yet change is also inevitable.
Next to Stephen on my left is Little Mary, Stephen’s half-sister. She has Jerry’s blue eyes and brown hair, but her skin is darker. Mary is eight, the first child born at Amarna, and Esther named her for me. An honor, I know, but I hope she won’t have to be called Little Mary too many more years. Probably not. She’s not a scholar like her brother, but she’s extraordinarily adept with her hands. Now she’s drawing cats on her gessoed slate, and for an eight-year-old, her drawings catch the lithe essence of catness amazingly well.
Next to Mary is her singing partner, Deborah, who has also begun scrawling on her slate. She’s six, Miriam and Jerry’s youngest, and Miriam’s image, with her copper hair and fair skin. She’s vivacious and flirtatious as I suspect Miriam might once have been. Or wanted to be. I suppose I encourage that in Deborah even at the risk of spoiling her.
The youngest of the children isn’t here. She’s only three, and hasn’t yet become one of my children. Rebecca’s child—the one whose birth killed her. Rebecca’s last wish was that the child should be called Rachel. A fitting memorial, I think, to Rachel Morrow.
“All right, children, let’s begin.” I lean forward, pick up the damp rag in its plate in the center of the table, and hand it to Mary. “You and Deborah clean your slates. Now, today we’ll start with numbers. Specifically, the number one million. I’ve talked about millions of things before, but do any of you really know what a million is?”
Jonathan responds, “It’s a one with six zeros after it.”
“Yes. How long do you think it would take to count to a million?”
“You mean by ones? Well, it’d take a long time. Maybe a couple of hours.”
“Let’s see if we can figure out exactly how long. First, we’ll count up to a thousand and time it by the clock.” I look at the Seth Thomas on the spool cabinet on the north wall as I rise and go to the blackboard to mark down the time. “Deborah, you start. Just count as high as you can, one number for every tick of the clock.”
Deborah only gets to twenty, then Isaac continues the count, with a few corrections, to one hundred. Mary takes it to three hundred, and Stephen and Jonathan complete it, and by then the younger ones are showing signs of boredom and agree heartily that it takes a long time just to count to a thousand. About fifteen minutes, in fact.
Then comes the multiplication, and while the others watch, Jonathan makes the calculations on the blackboard and finally reveals that to count to one million would require nearly ten and a half days. They are all satisfactorily amazed and, I hope, have learned a little about calculation as well as measuring time.
And million is a concept vital to these children. Their world is as small and flat as the world of their ancient ancestors. It took more than thirty millennia for humankind to discover million and the even larger numbers it spawned, and they gave us the measure of the universe.
That measure must not be lost.
By the time the midday meal is finished, cumulus clouds are marching in over the horizon, but they offer no real threat of rain. I find Stephen waiting for me on the deck, and once I’ve settled into my chair, he wastes no time on small talk. “Did you bring one of your diaries, Mary?”
His impatience pleases me. I reach into my skirt pocket for a diary—the third one—but again, it’s only a prop and a prod to memory. “Of course I did. Now, where was I?”
He turns in his chair, his hooded eyes intent. “You were telling me about Armageddon here at Amarna.”
I open the diary, study the erratic notations, and it requires a stringent mental bracing to return in memory to that time. It reminds me that spring days spent in quiet, satisfying endeavors are the obverse of dark days spent in terror, and the coin can flip so quickly, so casually. “Yes, when Rachel and I retreated into our cave.”
“Your cave?”
“The basement. But it seemed like a cave to me. I felt like… like time had folded in on itself, and I was a Cro-Magnon woman huddled at the hearth in my cave, with the glacier wind and the Dire Wolves howling outside, and tens of thousands of years had been lost as if they’d never existed.”
His eyes narrow thoughtfully, then he asks, “But why did you have to stay in the basement?”
“Because of the radiation from the bombs. FEMA—that was the Federal Emergency Management Agency—had published volumes on surviving a nuclear war. Surviving! They estimated it would take two weeks for the initial fallout to clear. So, Rachel and I stayed in our cave for two weeks without once even opening a window. We didn’t know how bad the radiation was here. Actually, I don’t think we got much initial fallout. That storm protected us. But we didn’t know. Jim had a Geiger counter, but we didn’t find it in the shelter or in their house, so we didn’t know about the radiation. We didn’t know anything. That was the worst part. We didn’t know whether Jim’s radio just wasn’t working or couldn’t pick up anything through the basement walls or whether there was no one out there broadcasting. The only thing we did know is that it was colder than usual for September. We just huddled there in our frigid cave for two endless weeks—wondering.”
I pause, look up into the cloud-dappled, springtime sky. “The odd thing is, Stephen, that was a time of hope. I mean, a time when it was still possible to hope. I imagined the worst, yes, but sometimes I imagined the best, which was that we’d made a mistake, that there hadn’t really been a war. Or I imagined that even if there had been a war, it wasn’t extensive enough to destroy all civilization. And I imagined that when we left our cave, we’d find other survivors, pool our resources, and work ourselves out of the disaster. I imagined we’d find at least vestiges of a government to help us. Of course, I realized it might not be ours. We might have lost the war.” I have to laugh as I speak those words. You can’t say that without either laughing or crying.
Then I look around at Stephen. “But the two weeks finally ended. Rachel and I finally came out of our cave.”
His obsidian eyes are fixed on me; he seems to have stopped breathing. “What did you find?”
“Nothing that I had imagined.”
I close the diary. I need no prod for memory now. Sometimes I wish I could forget.