May, Year 16 of the Anglo-American Alliance
The rain lashed heavily against the windows of every building on 21st Street, providing a welcome respite from the many weeks of sweltering heat every inhabitant of the city had suffered through. Even that day had been hot and miserable, and now all of a sudden at five in the evening there was blessed rain.
Inside the 21st Street Mission, the usual clamor of homeless men eating, talking and laughing seemed louder than usual to the eighteen-year-old girl sitting curled up on a window seat in the empty social room, gazing out at the driving rain. Her hands were pressed flat against the glass as if she were subconsciously trying to escape through it, and her pretty face was drawn and troubled.
The sound of a few notes being picked out on a piano drifted up from the cellar and drew Edith Keeler out of her reverie. The music stopped abruptly, then changed into something by Beethoven… or perhaps Bach. She always got them confused; music, while not forbidden, was discouraged, and Edith was not exactly musical.
Edith moved away from the window and crept away. She opened the door at the top of the cellar stairs and went slowly down about halfway, then stood on a step, leaning against the wall, listening. Again the music stopped, and a man’s voice hissed, “Are you crazy, Mr. Spock? Do you want people to hear you?”
“Who would hear but your landlady?”
“Mission, Mr. Spock, mission. They provide help to the poor and homeless. Mrs. Keeler’s late husband’s family has been running this place for “ for a very long time.”
“And it has not yet been shut down by the Enforcers?”
“Not yet.”
Edith sighed. She and her mother lived in fear of their life, their mission, being shut down by the Enforcers. She also knew that her mother was harboring a man who helped escaped prisoners from the XP, Christopher Pike. Edith admired Pike, though she had only spoken to him twice and only saw him occasionally “ sweeping the floor, dusting bookshelves, making coffee. For one thing, he used a forbidden name, though it wasn’t his legal name. For another, he helped those in even more dire straits than the poor who came to the mission, inspiring Edith to help other people despite the constant danger.
Edith again focused on the muffled conversation. “You can play the piano on Sundays, when the mission’s closed “ unless Mrs. Keeler complains. But for now you could come help. We are trying to build “ “
“It will never work.”
“That’s what Number One said at first. It’s only your first day. You’ll come around.”
There was the sound of a hand clapping a shoulder, and then what sounded like the old piano bench being knocked over. “Sorry,” said Pike’s voice.
Edith stole back upstairs before anyone could miss her, thinking with sorrow about the men and women who were still trapped in the experimental facility. Helping them: that was what she wanted to do. She was sure of it.
“Let me help,” she whispered, and a small smile crept over her pretty face.
--
Amanda Grayson lay sprawled on her small bed, her limbs stretched out awkwardly and her tangled, graying brown hair fanning out to cover most of her back and arms. Her eyes shut, she breathed heavily for several seconds before a strong hand grabbed her arm and hauled her upright, spinning her around to face her interrogator.
“Admit it,” said the man, blowing his foul breath in her face. “You helped your son to escape.”
“No,” she gasped. “I didn’t know he was going to. I never “ “
He took her shoulders, shook her. “Spock is an inferior life-form, an animal! He did not have the intelligence necessary to escape from us! You must have helped him!”
She swept her hair out of her eyes, glaring at the man. “My son is a brilliant man.”
“He’s subhuman,” the only other Enforcer in the room said matter-of-factly, folding his arms across his chest. “A dangerous mutation. That’s why we discourage interbreeding between Anglo-Americans and foreigners; it results in deformed freaks.”
The Enforcer who held her threw her to the floor. “Tell us about your mate, treacherous swine. He was a foreigner, a Jew.”
“Y-yes.”
“His name?”
Amanda bit her lip, looking down. “My husband’s name was Sarek.”
The Enforcers looked at each other. “Sarek? That’s no kind of a name,” one said.
“Are you lying?” The other man seized Amanda and slammed her into the ground. “What was your mate’s name really? First and last!”
“My husband’s name was Sarek,” she repeated stubbornly. “You… could not pronounce the last.”
The Enforcer again put his face very close to Amanda’s. “Listen, traitor, he wasn’t your husband, because Anglo-Americans can’t marry foreigners. You could be sitting pretty in a little bungalow with your husband and kids right now if you’d just married a normal person.”
“I loved Sarek…”
“Oh, sure,” said the Enforcer in a tone of great disgust. “You make me sick, Grayson. But your mate’s name doesn’t matter “ only that he was a foreigner.”
The other Enforcer crossed over to Amanda and hauled her to her feet again. “Did Sarek have pointy ears and slanted eyebrows? Did Sarek bleed green?”
Amanda dropped her gaze. “Uh “ no.”
“The devil himself came to mock a union between you and a subhuman foreigner,” one of the Enforcers sneered. Amanda covered her face with her hands. She couldn’t take it, couldn’t stand there and bear it any longer, even with the limited mental techniques she had learned from her husband and had tried to teach to her son. It wasn’t even the physical discomfort so much as the fact that she was unable to help Spock, unable to stop this slander of her husband’s people. Spock was not a deformed half-foreigner, nor was he the devil, but she was sure it would have been worse if the Enforcers “ or indeed Spock himself “ knew the truth.
Dimly Amanda was aware of hands striking her, but she remained limp, her eyes half-lidded. There was nothing they could force from her, even if she had known anything. She was the wife of Sarek, whether or not he still lived, and that thought was enough to sustain her until the darkness clouded her vision and welcomed her into its soothing embrace. At last, Amanda gladly surrendered herself to the blissful peace of unconsciousness.