Undersea

Chapter 4: Before the War

Life had changed for Sarah's family in the days after grandma's inquiry. Her dangerous books had all been confiscated, save the one Sarah had taken with her that day, and father had been removed from his position in the Data Department. They were moved into a small apartment in the Old City near an oxygen generation plant that hummed and chugged constantly. Sleep was hard in those first days.

After the inquiry they were told grandma had been sent to confinement somewhere in the New City and no visitors were allowed. No news of her comings or goings came to their ears after that. She had been 'dissapeared' from their lives. Sarah's family was warned not to look into the matter further. There were implications of death.

"Thank goodness these volumes were only found amongst the old women's belongings!" Sir LaRosa had said at the inquiry, referring to the books Sarah hid under grandma's pillow just before the Mariner Patrol showed up. "I shudder to think what would have happened if these books had gotten into the hands of someone else!" Sir LaRosa looked gravely at Sarah and the council nodded in agreement. "Our children are so important!" said one.

"For both teaching and experimentation apparently," grandma had said, more to herself then anyone. Most had heard it.

Sarah always smiled at the memory, but grandma's barb had no meaning to Sir LaRosa.

"I perceive sarcasm," he had said in a befuddled tone, "otherwise we would be in complete agreement."

- - -

Father's new job was in the hot bowels of the city, amongst the boilers and steam works that harnessed geothermal energy. Oxygen production, water desalination, the machines in the factories, and the great digging engines that expanded the city up, down, and deeper into the rock all thirsted for that energy. It was exhausting work with long hours: twelve on, twelve off, six days a week. Each week it seemed there where new burns and cuts on his arms and legs; tokens of the dangers involved in supplying Undersea with it's life blood of power. Sarah always did her best to dress father's wounds but scars accumulated. Often father was to tired to care.

The first weeks after the inquiry mother cried daily and when she was not crying she was arguing with father, though he had little strength for it. At last the situation did her in: the constant hum of the oxygen plant, the cramped quarters, the fear that the Mariner Patrol would come back and break everything a second time. Mother took Jack and was gone. She married someone higher and went to live with him in the spacious residential district reserved for the elite. Sarah heard there was even grass and trees there, some of the very things Sarah yearned most for! But Sarah had refused to go; she could not leave father. He had lost so much and she wondered what her absence might do to him. Sarah felt she was the last thing he had, and now his most precious. Not that she would have abandoned him, yet father had refused to be bitter about all that had befallen him and Sarah had a hard time understanding that.

"Bitterness is a choice," he would say when they talked about the things that had happened since grandma's departure, "and where it leads I do not want to go!"

"But it's not my fault I feel this way, right?" Sarah would respond. "I mean look at our situation! Look at what happened to grandma and with mother, at what happened in the world above before we came here! We came here and things didn't get better, they got worse! Always worse. Always! Why?"

But father would gently shake his head and comfort Sarah until she calmed down and in him Sarah felt grandma's strength, a strength that stood like a mountain before Sir LaRosa and the Council of Seven and in the end had not been moved. A strength from old, yet unchanging in the newness of this environment, and Sarah sensed its truth was not dependent on circumstance. In Sarah's heart the great cogs and wheels of timeless machinery awakened and stirred, and she acknowledged this movement to father and her desire to be as unyielding as grandma had been when she faced forces greater than herself, and as strong in her circumstances as father was in his unbitterness. Father had given her a hug and showed her the way.