Laura Marie
Chapter 2
Even after many months living on Harvest, Seesaw still didn’t quite know how to sleep in a barracks bunk. In the underground barracks beneath the many fields of corn where he worked, Seesaw had joined 6 others in barracks 00PHA for their dinner porridge. As usual, Azzan had settled off on her own – the camaraderie that they shared working on the harvest combine dissolving as usual when they got back to the group. That night he tried to sleep but instead spent most of the time thinking about why she was slowly opening up to him while working but as soon as she got back to the barracks she shut down around the others. She occasionally talked with Deek, the Midslat hacker, but mostly she worked out or read by herself for the precious hour or two between dinner and bed.
The lights in the barracks snapped on at 6:30, as they always did, indicating that Seesaw’s long wrestle with sleep on the hard flat bed was over. Back on Upslat, he’d been treated like a king; he realized this after only a few days on the planet, but kept re-discovering it as his body proved just how uncomfortable a life of work and no luxuries could be. He had slept on soft beds, eaten varied and rich foods, and generally been kept in the most comfort in the world. He lifted his aching body out of the bunk and put on his uniform pants and shirt. Compared to his clothes on the Upslat, he looked ridiculously plain in the beaten and dirtied cornsilk cloth. He wanted to be at peace on Harvest, but he couldn’t help noticing every twinge, every blow to his dignity. It made him feel like a bad revolutionary and a spoiled child.
He climbed the rungs from the barracks dormitory past smooth red stone up to the open dining area, voracious for his morning porridge. The proportions on Harvest were calibrated to be adequate for humans, but were quite insubstantial compared to the sumptuous dining of Upslat meals with his family. Most of the criminals in 00PHA had come to prison already willowy or nearly malnourished, but he’d come in well satisfied, flabby around the edges of his reasonably good physique. The whole time here had felt like slow starvation, especially given how quickly one could eat a bowl of porridge in silence. On Upslat, meals were savored: there was long conversation and each dish was complicated and served in small portions. Everyone commented on the unique aspects of each food that came out of the synthesizer and was then plated and served by the family chef.
Lash joined him in the breakfast room. Lash was another of the Midslatters in 00PHA, a tall thin girl with long blonde hair that she was winding into a braided bun on top of her head as she walked to the breakfast counter. She looked sleepy too, though her modest Midslat upbringing meant she was less shocked by Harvest than Seesaw. She still complained more than he did. “Ugh,” she said. “The beds here are the worst. How’d you sleep?”
“Oh, you know. My body hasn’t found a way to like that mattress yet,” he replied. They dug into their simple bowls of porridge, lined up steaming at the front of the room by their barracks ‘parent’ Noran. He was not present this morning though; probably had duties in some other area.
“Today I’m being transferred,” Lash said. “They don’t want me in the shucking room any more.”
“Interesting,” he said. “You have done a lot for our numbers, keeping us always ahead of the standard production.”
“I have more to lose than you all,” she said flatly. “No one else is in here for as many crateloads as I am.” Lash referred often to crateloads, the unit of measure that sentences on Harvest were determined in. 10 million crateloads roughly equated to a year of labor, but good behavior, great efficiency in production, or unusually dangerous or difficult jobs could yield more crateloads than usual. Lash’s 200 million crate sentence meant she was more interested in cutting her crateloads than most of the other 00PHA residents, who all had sentences between 30 and 60 million crateloads.
“I tried to ask Azzan about missing the Slats yesterday,” Seesaw said idly as he ate.
“I cannot figure her out,” Lash said. “The twins and Deek and you are all so friendly and make this such a decent place, but she cannot seem to join the team. Didn’t she grow up as a street orphan? Of all people, she must know we’re stronger as a group.” Seesaw didn’t say this, but he knew that because their crateloads were averaged across the whole barracks, Lash wasn’t altruistically hoping that Azzan would become her friend. She knew that if she could get her on board, she would be more likely to work hard and increase their crateloads per week.
“She works harder than you’d believe; we had a no-shut-down day on the harvest combine yesterday, which is basically unheard of according to Noran” Seesaw responded. “But I don’t know what she’s so afraid of with us. She basically doesn’t talk to anyone but Deek.”
“Remember when we all got assigned for the first time, and she was assigned to work with you?” Lash said as other barracks members began coming up the ladder, with Azzan at the rear. “I was so stunned. She’s more than meets the eye.”
Seesaw wasn’t thinking of the moment they’d been assigned to their jobs, though that had been an important day. He was thinking about Upslat and the life he’d live there, and the way that his rebellion had delivered him this life of hard labor and harder mattresses.
The morning in question, Seesaw didn’t know what to do about his mother.
He’d woken up in his parents’ house, electrified with thoughts. Seesaw’s dreams were always lively: full of the bright gardens, schools, and streets of his youth. He also envisioned dangerous activities and exciting adventures in the darker, dingier world he imagined of Midslat and Downslat, where he had never been. His father, important and busy as he was, kept a close rein on him these first 16 years of his life, and never gave me permission to leave the Upslat. Seesaw’s daydreams had to be lived out here, in the splendor of the most elite members of the Slats’ society.
His toughts this morning were, as usual, about equality and revolution. He read every update on the internet from the equal-slats-revolutionary Oltraff, and he was always trying to get others to read them too. Seesaw’s plan for equality was vague at best, but he knew that most people, if they really knew how much better the Upslat lived than the Downslat and Midslat, they would want equality and join him in changing the way things were done. Only the people like his father stood in his way.
“Remember, “Master Sawyer,” the maid said, rushing in with an armload of clothes and a plate full of steaming breakfast foods. “You have an appointment with the tailor and the milliner this morning, and lunch with your mother.”
“For the last time, I’m Seesaw!” Seesaw groaned. “I just want you to be my friend and equal, Maddie, not some kind of servant.”
“But my job is to be your servant, Master Sawyer,” Maddie said with a shrug.
“Fine. Ugh. Thanks for the reminder; I’ll get moving… when’s the meeting? I have to be somewhere at noon,” he said, thinking of the meet-up he’d organized. If he couldn’t get to the other Slats, he would always find creative ways to plan his future from here on the Upslat.
“It’s at 10, so you better hurry,” Maddie said, setting the tray on his nightstand. “But don’t wolf your breakfast; all that rich food will make you ill.”
The rich food in question gave off a thick, pleasant aroma: there was a pile of thick panckaes with butter dripping in fat drops off the sides, a glass of juice and three strips of perfectly crisp bacon. Whoever had created that recipe for the food simulators was truly outdoing themselves. Seesaw’s best friend, Mia, was training to be a simulator scientist now that school was over, and he’d seen even her best projects, which couldn’t compare to the realism of the simple pancakes and bacon he ate every day. He truly benefited from every good thing the Slats had to offer, which always made him feel like a bit of a hypocrite. It was hard to feel that way for long as he bit into the perfect food.
He wished, as he ate, that he didn’t have to go with his mother to the milliner and the tailor this morning, and he worried he wouldn’t be able to get out of this lunch she’d snuck into his calendar. Getting his clothes fitted for law school training made him realize that his freedom to run about with his friends and read whatever he liked was about to draw to a close. It was customary, between their general schooling and their specialty training, for Upslat students to spend a vacation with their family. If his father had been home much, it would have made him crazy, but with all his merchant dealings and work with the government his father was basically never home. These days of freedom had allowed him to forge more connections with the rebellious side of Upslat than ever before. After law school began, he’d have to scale back and focus on learning enough about the system to take it down from the inside. He didn’t know exactly what that would look like, but he was glad he would have more time to figure it out in school.
“Sawyer!” a voice floated down the hallway and into his room. “You slept late again, and now we’re late for this meeting. I won’t have you losing your spot with this tailor; he has access to the only materials suitable for law uniforms. I won’t have us going to that atrocious second-rate woman we visited when you were in high school.”
“I doubht someone who made my old school uniforms would have any trouble with law school; all those frills and ruffles. I looked like a baron or something from ancient aristocracy,” Seesaw replied, not moving any faster.
“I was thinking,” his mother went on, entering the room and ignoring his statement. “That we could go get lunch with Belinda and Mia today. Mia is about to head for the academy to do some pre-training group bonding exercises, and you do want to see her, don’t you?”
Seesaw felt a stab of regret; Mia was his main friend who he had not told about his rebellious ideas; he wished she wasn’t going to be so busy for his last few weeks of freedom. He’d find a way to see her, but he simply couldn’t miss the meeting today. “No, mother, I’ve got a meeting with some interested law school fellows who want to form a first-year review team.” If he had a coin for every time he’d made up a nice-sounding organization in order to make his mother let him skip social lunches, he’d have all the money he needed.
“Fine, I will meet Belinda, but do call Mia. You don’t find girls like her every day, and from such a good family…”
“Mom!”
“Well, hurry!”
Seesaw slurped the last of his juice, pushed his mother out of the room and got ready. Within minutes they were off.
Upslat was, as always, a sight: the buildings under the atmosphere bubble gleamed with a steel-and-glass shine and the geometric designs and sculptures that surrounded most homes and buildings swung gently in the air purification system breezes. Above it all, the stars and the sun shone down, the sun peeking around the dark shadow of Murkth, the planet that rose in the morning. He preferred the afternoon, when Harvest, the golden planet covered in corn plants, rose beside the sun.
Seesaw and his mother hurried past children and grown-ups, mostly Upslatters but with a few Midslatters whose jobs brought them to the Upslat. The majority of those who lived her had high power jobs and were grandly dressed in the robes or uniforms of their professions: lawyers, politicians, scientists, doctors, and engineers of all sorts, as well as merchants like his father. They were the class that kept the Slats running; Seesaw respected their jobs but had long suspected that they deserved fewer of the lovely things they had on Upslat than they kept for themselves. As they hurried past, he noticed famous entertainers and reporters shopping in his neighborhood, and his mother whispered absently about them.
They turned onto a street lined with beautifully decorated shops offering artful goods, and they ducked breathlessly into the third one. “We’re here!” Seesaw’s mother cried. “Let the fittings begin!”
It was essential to Seesaw that he go through with this, but at the first possible moment he could, he gave his mother a kiss, asked her to say hello to Mia and her mother, and ran out of the door. Seesaw’s meetings took place on the edge of Upslat, near the vents down to Midslat, so he had a very long way to go and he didn’t want to miss the gathering.
The enormous, flat city was a perfect square, as were the other two slats, though they overlapped slightly where the connections were, like three wide stairsteps. At the overlap there were tunnels where people could travel from one Slat to another for work. There was a shuttle that carried folks up and down every day, usually if they were older and unwilling to scale the long flights of stairs. It was in this area, right on the edge of the two Slats, as close to breaking his father’s rule as he could without doing so, that Seesaw had found a home for his renegade ideas.
He met with the same creative folks he always did, those who were pursuing their dreams of art or entertainment careers who considered themselves part of the “creative class” – most of them also grew up on Upslat and their parents could keep them in grand style while they worked on their artistic masterpieces. Seesaw knew he was more intent on the revolution than most of the others, but they’d been working together on a manifesto for weeks, and he had finally finished a draft he thought they would be proud of; today they would decide how to disseminate it.
“What do you think?” He asked the group, all lounging in a coffee shop where they drank the simulated stimulant.
“It’s good,” one of them said, then sighed. “I think that Seesaw needs to be the one to put his name on it.” The others grinned and nodded.
“Me? Why?” Seesaw was a little worried that they weren’t willing to sign their own names to it, given that it was a fairly seditious document. Most documents of this kind gained so little notoriety that they were unlikely to get anyone in trouble, but there were technically laws on the books, he knew from his law school prep, that could be used to convict someone of sedition.
“Your father is instrumental in so much of the legislation these days,” one girl pointed out. “It would be amazing and get so much screen time if everyone knew that you, of all people, were involved.”
“I mean, I’m not ashamed of it,” Seesaw said. “But what about all of you?”
“We’re just starting out,” a boy said. “We cannot get as much attention as you can, not when our artistic careers are just getting started.”
Seesaw looked at his supposed friends, worried that they were not thinking about his best interests. But then he thought of Mia, who would soon find out that he had these ideas, and of his father, who never thought he really was serious about his beliefs. It was time to put some weight behind his words. He clicked and typed away at his tablet, finding a submission call for the most weighty newspaper in the Slats. He submitted his manifesto, “Equality for the Slats” and let out a breath he didn’t even know he had been holding. Even after years of believing those things, he felt like he might have just made a much bigger mistake than he imagined.
Seesaw spent the rest of the afternoon at home reading law texts, so when his father came home in time for dinner, he was totally surprised. His mother was as well, saying “Did the minister of air purification cancel your dinner plans?”
“No, I did,” his father said. “Your son and I need to have a talk.” He looked at Seesaw, the winning blonde curls, the neat but ample frame of his son. Seesaw saw his typical gaze – believing he was a person of promise, if he could just leave off all the rebellion business.
“Sawyer, in my study. Now.”
The study was dark and full of real paper texts: tax documents, government regulations on business, miles of type that no one interesting would ever want to read but which were essential for the ruling elite to understand. The high-backed chair where Seesaw’s father sat down was representative of his demeanor in most circumstances: grave, intense, and important. Seesaw gulped; for his father to miss a major meeting was a sign that something was definitely wrong.
“Sawyer, what do you know of my career?” He said, looking at his wall full of diplomas and accolades. It was almost, Seesaw thought, like he was talking to himself.
“It seems like it has been a very successful career” Seesaw said, neither wanting to compliment him nor wanting to anger him. Whatever they were about to talk about was unlikely to require any extra frustrating attitude.
“Did you know that the Murdocks were in danger of having to move to Midslat when I was a child? Do you know how hard I had to work to get to where we are today?”
“I didn’t know that,” Seesaw said, genuinely surprised. “Grandma and Grandpa almost moved?”
“They did,” Seesaw’s father said. “They had spent more money than they had and the main option open to them was to move to Midslat if anyone found out how impoverished they were. You see, Upslat is more than just hard work and great rewards. It’s also about maintaining a certain figure in publish, I mean public.
“You know how they got out of it, scraping by with very little but maintaining their social status? It was the help of their friends. They knew all the powerful ministers, so while they consolidated, reinvested, and spent very little money for a few years, they relied on the generosity of spirit of those they had supported into power. They were invited to balls and dinners and their names were kept above reproach for a few years while I was going to school. By the time investing and work turned them around, they could afford to be Upslatters again.
“I worry about you, son. You seem determined to ruin your own chances with your rebellious behavior and seditious attitudes. The Slats were created with zones for a reason; greater responsibility is associated with greater rewards, and histories of the past taught us that there will always be those who rise to the top, to work hard, while there well also be those who need to be provided for. The system works.”
“Father, you know this won’t work on me,” Seesaw said. “I have had this argument a million times. I think that more travel between the Slats and more equal educational opportunities would help everyone get along better, cost the government less, and reduce poverty. I’ve studied it; I know what I’m talking about.”
“What you cannot seem to understand, after all your reading,” he said, his voice getting low and angry. “Is that this decision of yours to advocate radical equality measures affects your family. It will ruin your friendship, opportunities, prospects for the future. Do you even know the legislation we’ve been working on in the legislature? Do you understand what it looks like for me to have a seditious son?”
“You aren’t ever home, so how would I know what you have been working on?” Seesaw never wanted to show his emotions to his father, but it often ended this way, with him fighting back, trying to convince him that he should be more involved in their lives while still trying to convince him. It would be so helpful to have someone like Seesaw’s father on their side, if they were really going to change the Slats for the future.
“I have been working on the Crackdown legislation, to reduce crime in the Slats,” he sanpped. “There’s been so much petty theft lately, with these orphans growing up, and they are trying to find long-term solutions for the many repeat offenders. One of the solutions is a zero tolerance policy for basic crimes: community service is being assigned for all cases, down on the Harvest planet.”
“For all kinds of crimes?” Seesaw said. “That seems harsh, given how Harvest used to be only for very bad crimes.”
“Yes, and even minor seditious language charges can get someone convicted,” he said. “I keep an alert on your name, you know. I know what you published.”
Seesaw sighed. He finally understood; his father wanted to scare him into taking down his article, try to convince him he’d be sent to the prison planet if he didn’t. This prospect, though initially frightening, was more a curiosity to Seesaw: finally meeting Midslatters, Downslatters, maybe even actual alleyfolk orphans. It sounded like a place to start a revolution.
“Let them find me,” Seesaw said stubbornly. “I’ll take Harvest over this Upslat tyranny.”
“I’ve seen the Slats you speak so highly of,” his father said, more sad than angry. “There’s nothing romantic about them. You chafe here in the lap of luxury, but I wonder how you will feel, if you really get convicted. Know this: I’m pulling no strings for you. I cannot call in favors to help a disrespectful and ungrateful son.”
“I’m grateful for the goodness of others,” Seesaw retorted. “When I see Upslatters behaving well, I will be quiet.”
Abruptly, his father stood and left, pausing as if he would turn around again, but then thinking better of it and leaving the room. Seesaw’s thoughts whirled in circles: what if the censors did see the article? What if they chose to make an example of him for some reason? He was fascinated by and drawn to Harvest as a place, but how long would they take him away, and could he handle it? He’d miss Mia and honestly, all the luxury of his life: from the movies he’d seen, life on the planet was far from comfortable. He’d daydreamt for years about casting off his high-class lifestyle and running away to somewhere more equal, but now that his father had brought him face-to-face with the prospect, he wasn’t sure he could handle it.
When the he was arrested on his own doorstep the following week, he behaved in a way both stronger and weaker than he thought. For all his readings of the obscure philosophy of equality, he was very worried as he approached the courtroom, that he had gravely miscalculated what he was capable of.