Having built one civilisation, the Deep Citizens had to build another, this time sealed from the outside world. They adapted their existing cities and spaces where they could, but not everything could be saved. The First Chamber was too close and too open to the surface and so it had to be abandoned.
The excavating did not always go well. Several of the new spaces collapsed before they could be stabilized. In other chambers, fissures opened to the surface that made it impossible to trap air within.
The tragedy was twofold. The Deep Citizens had built chambers intended not just for themselves and their descendants, but for as many people of Musca as possible. They had drilled too fast and hollowed out chambers too large and too fragile. In their desperation to make room, they had over-reached. There was not enough space—nor air, nor food for that matter—for everyone. Even before the seals were closed, it was apparent that there would not be enough room even for all the existing Deep Citizens.
And so the Deep Citizens created the ballot.
Moko and Arlyana did not stay to explore the First Chamber as they had the Sundome. It was one thing to see the sun and the surface it had scoured of life; it was another to stand in the halls where the first ballot had been drawn.
On the morning of their fourth day, they were woken by a buzz at the door. Arlyana checked the video stream, sighed, and told Moko to stay in bed while she dealt with it.
Not knowing what else to do, he lay there staring at the ceiling with a view to getting back to sleep. That plan soon became impossible as he heard Arlyana’s voice rising in emotion and he began to wonder what “it” was that needed dealing with. Another voice, deep and male, spoke in hushed tones.
Troubled by a dread that gripped tighter as Arlyana’s voice became more strained, Moko decided that he could keep his promise to stay away from the door while keeping alert for Arlyana’s safety by watching the video feed from the door. He tapped the screen and the picture flickered on; he quickly hit the mute button.
Arlyana was wrapped in her dressing gown, talking to a dark-eyed man who had dressed and groomed fastidiously, as if he were on his way to a funeral. In his hand he held a card or maybe an envelope and he was offering it to Arlyana while she adamantly refused to take it. As Arlyana become more animated, the man seemed to crumble from within. His shoulders dropped, his giving hand fell to his side.
Although Moko could make out nothing of the conversation, the volume rose to the point where occasional disconnected phrases from Arlyana filtered back to him. Moko rubbed his eyes to make sure he was seeing clearly. If anything, it was the stranger and not Arlyana who was likely to need his help.
The door slammed shut and Moko flicked off the video. Arlyana stormed back inside the unit, tossed off her gown, and crawled naked back into bed with Moko.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
The door buzzed in three staccato bursts.
“Ignore it,” she said.
A few seconds later, there was another buzz at the door, then another, this time somehow sadder, and then the buzzer fell quiet. The silence stretched for a few seconds, then past a minute, then past three minutes. The door would not ring again. Arlyana wormed herself under Moko’s arm and began to breathe in shudders. Not knowing what to say, Moko said nothing, which was exactly right.
The Heritage Wall was an hour by train from Arlyana’s quarters. They stepped out of the station into a low chamber, a mere twenty metres tall, but so long and straight that it seemed to be a continuation of the train tunnel that had brought them.
The southern wall of the chamber was a milled plane that followed a subtly saddled polynomial function. The curve of the wall had a strangely emotive property: it could reach into people and make them pause in awe. Along the wall, following the relief lines of the function, were dots of blood where people had pricked a finger and pressed it to the rock.
“My family has a patch here,” said Moko. He led Arlyana into the cavern, past robotic curators that cleaned the cavern and sharpened the edges of etchings that had eroded, and showed her the cluster of blood spots from his ancestors.
“These stop about thirty years ago,” she said, reading the dates etched under each blood print.
Moko shrugged. “Most of my family joined the Brethren of Light. I’m the only one left on Musca.”
“You have no family here?”
“My closest relative, both genetically and spatially, is my brother. He’s on a Brethren mission ship halfway to B right now. He’s about fifty light-hours away.”
“You don’t seem very Brethren to me,” said Arlyana with a touch of amusement in her voice.
“Well,” said Moko, “my brother is very Brotherly. However, in spite of being a brother to my brother, I am not Brotherly at all.”
Arlyana shook her head. “Was that supposed to make sense?”
“If you spend enough time around Brethren, yes. Now show me your family plot.”
Arlyana led him to her family’s cluster of blood prints. It was a large display that went back twelve generations. Moko was impressed.
“Do you think I should put my mark in your family’s area?” he asked. “They don’t even know I exist.”
“Do always worry so much about etiquette?” Arlyana asked. “You do understand that being balloted gives you a certain degree of latitude?”
“It feels presumptuous to me.”
Arlyana scoffed at him. “Since I’m not planning to put my own mark here, it’s a moot point.”
Moko waited for an explanation but Arlyana did not seem disposed to provide one. “Come on,” she said. “We’ll find our own place, miles from anyone else.”
“Wait a moment,” said Moko. Arlyana tried to draw him into moving on, but Moko refused. He was living with one Arlyana mystery already; he was not going let her keep spinning away from him. He examined the blood spots carefully, reading the names, dates, and relationships etched into the rock beneath them.
“I think I’ve got it. Here,” he said, pointing to a spattered blotch of crimson on the wall. “This is your sister’s blood. Her name is Uldi. And underneath that is a girl’s name, Caris, but no blood. The space has been set aside for a girl who has not been born yet. Your niece-to-be.” He studied Arlyana’s face; she was giving nothing away. He continued, “It makes you feel bad. You know it shouldn’t. But you can’t help it. She is about to be born and you’ve been balloted.”
“Yes, you’ve got it. I don’t like to admit it, but I’m resentful,” said Arlyana.
“I didn’t say resentful,” said Moko.
“I did,” she replied, then pulled him away by the arm.
They walked along the Heritage Wall until they found an area that was almost devoid of blood marks. Arlyana called over one of the curators, a thin robotic agent that introduced itself and asked what they would like etched beside their blood marks. They decided their names and a small bridge between them would be enough.
The curator robot pricked Moko’s skin. Blood budded on the tip of his thumb. Moko pressed it to the rock face and the curator etched his name and the date around it. Arlyana offered her hand to the curator. She pressed her blood to the wall next to Moko’s and watched as the curator finished etching.
As they rode the train back, Arlyana fell asleep on Moko’s shoulder. Now that he had time to think, he could see that Arlyana had been too quick to agree to his guess, and had been far too blithe about it. It bothered him that Arlyana had spun some more mist about herself. For someone who wanted to share terminal intimacies, she seemed paradoxically reluctant to let him understand her.
He ran through the names and dates in his mind, trying to reconstruct from memory Arlyana’s family tree and the sequence of events. Something was amiss with the story he had intuited.
Moko brushed Arlyana’s hair with his hand while she slept and wondered why she kept so many things to herself.
Moko said, “This looks terrible.”
“Should I care how it looks?”
“People will say I only wanted you for the time you gave me.”
“I want this more than I care what people think,” said Arlyana.
