Hazards of Time Travel Read online

  Now we were older, and I was tall myself (for a girl of my age: five feet eight), Roddy didn’t torment me quite as much. Mostly it was his expression—a sort of shifting, frowning, smirk-smiling, meant to convey that Roddy was thinking certain thoughts best kept secret.

  That smirking little smile just for me—like an ice-sliver in the heart.

  My parents had explained: it was difficult for Roddy, who hadn’t done well enough in high school to merit a scholarship even to the local NAS state college, to see that I was doing much better than he’d done in the same school. Embarrassing to him to know that his younger sister earned higher grades than he had, from the very teachers he’d had at Pennsboro High. And Roddy had little chance of ever being admitted to a federally mandated four-year university, even if he took community college courses, and our parents could afford to send him.

  Something had gone wrong during Roddy’s last two years of high school. He’d become scared about things—maybe with reason. He’d never confided in me.

  At Pennsboro High—as everywhere in our nation, I suppose—there was a fear of seeming “smart”—(which might be interpreted as “too smart”)—which would result in calling unwanted attention to you. In a True Democracy all individuals are equal—no one is better than anyone else. It was OK to get B’s, and an occasional A−; but A’s were risky, and A+ was very risky. In his effort not to get A’s on exams, though he was intelligent enough, and had done well in middle school, Roddy seriously missed, and wound up with D’s.

  Dad had explained: it’s like you’re a champion archer. And you have to shoot to miss the bull’s-eye. And something willful in you assures that you don’t just miss the bull’s-eye but the entire damned target.

  Dad had laughed, shaking his head. Something like this had happened to my brother.

  Poor Roddy. And poor Adriane, since Roddy took out his disappointment on me.

  It wasn’t talked about openly at school. But we all knew. Many of the smartest kids held back in order not to call attention to themselves. HSPSO (Home Security Public Safety Oversight) was reputed to keep lists of potential dissenters/ MIs/ SIs, and these were said to contain the names of students with high grades and high I.Q. scores. Especially suspicious were students who were good at science—these were believed to be too “questioning” and “skeptic” about the guidelines for curriculum at the school, so experiments were no longer part of our science courses, only just “science facts” to be memorized (“gravity causes objects to fall,” “water boils at 212 degrees F.,” “cancer is caused by negative thoughts,” “the average female I.Q. is 7.55 points lower than the average male I.Q., adjusting for ST status”).

  Of course it was just as much of a mistake to wind up with C’s and D’s—that meant that you were dull-normal, or it might mean that you’d deliberately sabotaged your high school career. Too obviously “holding back” was sometimes dangerous. After graduation you might wind up at a community college hoping to better yourself by taking courses and trying to transfer to a state school, but the fact was, once you entered the workforce in a low-level category, like Roddy at MDB, you were there forever.

  Nothing is ever forgotten, no one is going anywhere they aren’t already at. This was a saying no one was supposed to say aloud.

  So, Dad was stuck forever as an ME2—medical technician, second rank—at the district medical clinic where staff physicians routinely consulted him on medical matters, especially pediatric oncology—physicians whose salaries were five times Dad’s salary.

  Dad’s health benefits, like Mom’s, were so poor Dad couldn’t even get treatment at the clinic he worked in. We didn’t want to think what it would mean if and when they needed serious medical treatment.

  I hadn’t been nearly as cautious in school as Roddy. I enjoyed school where I had (girl) friends close as sisters. I liked quizzes and tests—they were like games which, if you studied hard, and memorized what your teachers told you, you could do well.

  But then, sometimes I tried harder than I needed to try.

  Maybe it was risky. Some little spark of defiance provoked me.

  But maybe also (some of us thought) school wasn’t so risky for girls. There had been only a few DASTADs—Disciplinary Actions Securing Threats Against Democracy—taken against Pennsboro students in recent years, and these students had all been boys in category ST3 or below.

  (The highest ST—SkinTone—category was 1: “Caucasian.” Most residents of Pennsboro were ST1 or ST2 with a scattering of ST3’s. There were ST4’s in a neighboring district and of course dark-complected ST workers in all the districts. We knew they existed but most of us had never seen an actual ST10.)

  It seems like the most pathetic vanity now, and foolishly naïve, but at our school I was one of those students who’d displayed some talent for writing, and for art; I was a “fast study” (my teachers said, not entirely approvingly), and could memorize passages of prose easily. I did not believe that I was the “outstanding” student in my class. That could not be possible! I had to work hard to understand math and science, I had to read and reread my homework assignments, and to rehearse quizzes and tests, while to certain of my classmates these subjects came naturally. (ST2’s and 3’s were likely to be Asians, a minority in our district, and these girls and boys were very smart, yet not aggressive in putting themselves forward, that’s to say at risk.) Yet somehow it happened that Adriane Strohl wound up with the highest grade-point average in the Class of ’23—4.3 out of 5.

  My close friend Paige Connor had been warned by her parents to hold back—so Paige’s average was only 4.1, well inside the safe range. And one of the obviously smartest boys, whose father was MI, like my Dad, a former math professor, had definitely held back—or maybe exams so traumatized him, Jonny had not done well without trying, and his average was a modest/safe 3.9.

  Better to be a safe coward than a sorry hero. Why I’d thought such remarks were just stupid jokes kids made, I don’t know.

  Fact is, I had just not been thinking. Later in my life, or rather in my next life, as a university student, when I would be studying psychology, at least a primitive form of cognitive psychology, I would learn about the phenomenon of “attention”—“attentiveness”—that is within consciousness but is the pointed, purposeful, focused aspect of consciousness. Just to have your eyes open is to be conscious only minimally; to pay attention is something further. In my schoolgirl life I was conscious, but I was not paying attention. Focused on tasks like homework, exams, friends to sit with in cafeteria and hang out with in gym class, I did not pick up more than a fraction of what hovered in the air about me, the warnings of teachers that were non-verbal, glances that should have alerted me to—something . . .

  I would realize, in my later life, that virtually all of my life beforehand had been minimally conscious. I had questioned virtually nothing, I had scarcely tried to decipher the precise nature of what my parents were actually trying to communicate to me, apart from their words. For my dear parents were accursed with attentiveness. I had taken them for granted—I had taken my own bubble-life for granted . . .

  So it happened, Adriane Strohl was named valedictorian of her graduating class. Good news! Congratulations!

  Now I assume that no one else who might’ve been qualified wanted this “honor”—just as no one else wanted a Patriot Democracy Scholarship. Except there’d been some controversy, the school administration was said to favor another student for the honor of giving the valedictory address, not Adriane Strohl but a boy with a 4.2 average and also a varsity letter in football and a Good Democratic Citizenship Award, whose parents were allegedly of a higher caste than mine, and whose father was not MI but EE (a special distinction granted to Exiled persons who had served their terms of Exile and had been what was called 110 percent rehabilitated—Exile Elite).

  I’d known about the controversy vaguely, as a school rumor. The EE father’s son had not such high grades as I did, but it was believed that he would give a smoo
ther and more entertaining valedictory address, since his course of study was TV Public Relations and not the mainstream curriculum. And maybe administrators were concerned that Adriane Strohl would not be entertaining but would say “unacceptable” things in her speech?

  Somehow without realizing, over a period of years, I’d acquired a reputation among my teachers and classmates for saying “surprising” things—“unexpected” things—that other students would not have said. Impulsively I’d raised my hands and asked questions. I was not doubtful exactly—just curious, and wanting to know. For instance was a “science fact” always and inevitably a fact? Did water always boil at 212 degrees F., or did it depend upon how pure the water was? And were boy-students always smarter than girl students, judging from actual tests and grades in our school?

  Some of the teachers (male) made jokes about me, so that the class laughed at my silly queries; other (female) teachers were annoyed, or maybe frightened. My voice was usually quiet and courteous but I might’ve come across as willful.

  Sometimes the quizzical look in my face disconcerted my teachers, who took care always to compose their expressions when they stood in front of a classroom. There were approved ways of showing interest, surprise, (mild) disapproval, severity. (Our classrooms, like all public spaces and many private spaces, were “monitored for quality assurance” but adults were more keenly aware of surveillance than teenagers.)

  Each class had its spies. We didn’t know who they were, of course—it was said that if you thought you knew, you were surely mistaken, since the DCVSB (Democratic Citizens Volunteer Surveillance Bureau) chose spies so carefully, it was analogous to the camouflage wings of a certain species of moth that blends in seamlessly with the bark of a certain tree. As Dad said, Your teachers can’t help it. They can’t deviate from the curriculum. The ideal is lockstep—each teacher in each classroom performing like a robot and never deviating from script under penalty of—you know what.

  Was this true? For years in our class—the Class of NAS-23—there’d been vague talk of a teacher—how long ago, we didn’t know—maybe when we were in middle school?—who’d “deviated” from the script one day, began talking wildly, and laughing, and shaking his/her fist at the “eye” (in fact, there were probably numerous “eyes” in any classroom, and all invisible), and was arrested, and overnight Deleted—so a new teacher was hired to take his/her place; and soon no one remembered the teacher-who’d-been-Deleted. And after a while we couldn’t even remember clearly that one of our teachers had been Deleted. (Or had there been more than one? Were certain classrooms in our school haunted?) In our brains where the memory of ___ should have been, there was just a blank.

  Definitely, I was not aggressive in class. I don’t think so. But compared with my mostly meek classmates, some of whom sat small in their desks like partially folded-up papier-mâché dolls, it is possible that Adriane Strohl stood out—in an unfortunate way.

  In Patriot Democracy History, for instance, I’d questioned “facts” of history, sometimes. I’d asked questions about the subject no one ever questioned—the Great Terrorist Attacks of 9/11/01. But not in an arrogant way, really—just out of curiosity! I certainly didn’t want to get any of my teachers in trouble with the EOB (Education Oversight Bureau) which could result in them being demoted or fired or—“vaporized.”

  I’d thought that, well—people liked me, mostly. I was the spiky-haired girl with the big glistening dark-brown eyes and a voice with a little catch in it and a habit of asking questions. Like a really young child with too much energy in kindergarten, you hope will run in circles and tire herself out. With a kind of naïve obliviousness I earned good grades so it was assumed that, despite my father being of MI caste, I would qualify for a federally mandated State Democracy University.

  (That is, I was eligible for admission to one of the massive state universities. At these, a thousand students might attend a lecture, and many courses were online.)

  Restricted universities were far smaller, prestigious and inaccessible to all but a fraction of the population; though not listed online or in any public directory, these universities were housed on “traditional” campuses in Cambridge, New Haven, Princeton, etc., in restricted districts. Not only did we not know precisely where these centers of learning were, but we also had not ever met anyone with degrees from them.

  When in class I raised my hand to answer a teacher’s question I often did notice classmates glancing at me—my friends, even—sort of uneasy, apprehensive—What will Adriane say now? What is wrong with Adriane?

  There was nothing wrong with me! I was sure.

  In fact, I was secretly proud of myself. Maybe just a little vain. Wanting to think I am Eric Strohl’s daughter.

  The Arrest

  The words were brisk, impersonal: “Strohl, Adriane. Hands behind your back.”

  It happened so fast. At graduation rehearsal.

  So fast! I was too surprised—too scared—to think of resisting.

  Except I guess that I did—try to “resist”—in childish desperation tried to duck and cringe away from the officers’ rough hands on me—wrenching my arms behind my back with such force, I had to bite my lips to keep from screaming.

  What was happening? I could not believe it—I was being arrested.

  Yet even in my shock thinking I will not scream. I will not beg for mercy.

  My wrists were handcuffed behind my back. Within seconds I was a captive of the Homeland Security.

  I’d only just given my valedictorian’s speech and had stepped away from the podium, to come down from the auditorium stage, when there came our principal Mr. Mackay with a peculiar expression on his face—muted anger, righteousness, but fear also—to point at me, as if the arresting officers needed him to point me out at close range.

  “That is she—‘Adriane Strohl.’ That is the treasonous girl you seek.”

  Mr. Mackay’s words were strangely stilted. He seemed very angry with me—but why? Because of my valedictorian’s speech? But the speech had consisted entirely of questions—not answers, or accusations.

  I’d known that Mr. Mackay didn’t like me—didn’t know me very well but knew of me from my teachers. But it was shocking to see in an adult’s face a look of genuine hatred.

  “She was warned. They are all warned. We did our best to educate her as a patriot, but—the girl is a born provocateur.”

  Provocateur! I knew what the term meant, but I’d never heard such a charge before, applied to me.

  Later I would realize that the Arrest Warrant must have been drawn up for me before the rehearsal—of course. Mr. Mackay and his faculty advisers must have reported me to Youth Disciplinary before they’d even heard my valedictory speech—they’d guessed that it would be “treasonous” and that I couldn’t be allowed to give it at the graduation ceremony. And the Patriot Democracy Scholarship—that must have been a cruel trick, as well.

  As others stood staring at the front of the brightly lighted auditorium the Arrest Warrant was read to me by the female Arresting Officer. I was too stunned to hear most of it—only the accusing words arrest, detention, reassignment, sentencing—Treason-Speech and Questioning of Authority.

  QUICKLY THEN, Mr. Mackay called for an “emergency assembly” of the senior class.

  Murmuring and excited my classmates settled into the auditorium. There were 322 students in the class, and like wildfire news of my arrest had spread among them within minutes.

  Gravely Mr. Mackay announced from a podium that Adriane Strohl, “formerly” valedictorian of the class, had been arrested by the State on charges of Treason and Questioning of Authority; and what was required now was a “vote of confidence” from her peers regarding this action.

  That is, all members of the senior class (excepting Adriane Strohl) were to vote on whether to confirm the arrest, or to challenge it. “We will ask for a show of hands,” Mr. Mackay said, voice quavering with the solemnity of the occasion, “in a full, fair, and unbiased de
monstration of democracy.”

  At this time I was positioned, handcuffed, with a wet, streaked/guilty face, at the very edge of the stage. As if my classmates needed to be reminded who the arrestee Adriane Strohl was.

  Gripping my upper arms were two husky Youth Disciplinary Officers from the Youth Disciplinary Division of Homeland Security. They were one man and one woman and they wore dark blue uniforms and were equipped with billy clubs, Tasers, Mace, and revolvers in heavy holsters around their waists. My classmates stared wide-eyed, both intimidated and thrilled. An arrest! At school! And a show-of-hands vote which was not a novelty in itself except on this exciting occasion.

  “Boys and girls! Attention! All those in favor of Adriane Strohl being stripped of the honor of class valedictorian as a consequence of having committed treason and questioned authority, raise your hands—yes?” There was a brief stunned pause. Brief.

  Hesitantly, a few hands were lifted. Then, a few more.

  No doubt the presence of the uniformed Youth Disciplinary Officers glaring at them roused my classmates to action. Entire rows lifted their hands—Yes!

  Here and there were individuals who shifted uneasily in their seats. They were not voting, yet. I caught the eye of my friend Carla whose face too appeared to be wet with tears. And there was Paige all but signaling to me—I’m sorry, Adriane. I have no choice.

  As in a nightmare, at last a sea of hands were raised against me. If there were some not voting, clasping their hands in their laps, I could not see them.

  “And all opposed—no?” Mr. Mackay’s voice hovered dramatically as if he were counting raised hands; in fact, there was not a single hand, of all the rows of seniors, to be seen.

  “I think, then, we have a stunning example of democracy in action, boys and girls. ‘Majority rule—the truth is in the numbers.’”

  The second vote was hardly more than a repeat of the first: “We, the Senior Class of Pennsboro High, confirm and support the arrest of the former valedictorian, Adriane Strohl, on charges of Treason and Questioning of Authority. All those in favor . . .”