Our Dried Voices (10 page)

XVII

S
amuel pulled the five scraps of paper from his pocket and sorted through them until he found the one he wanted. He turned the picture in his hands to find the proper orientation, knelt next to the colonist lying still and lifeless on the ground and compared the man’s face to the image on the lower right side of the paper.

The expression was the same: the circular, hairless head, the eyes that popped from their sockets and stared blankly into nothingness, the lips pinched together and turned down at the edges with a thin trail of spittle running down from the left side of the man’s mouth. And the wavy lines next to the face in the picture unmistakably represented the river. The two circular shapes above them remained a mystery, but Samuel had no doubts about the meaning of the lower images. The river, or something in the water of the river, had caused this man to collapse, had caused his face to look this way. Before Samuel had found this scrap of paper—what was it, two days ago now?—he had never seen anything like this happen to anyone in the colony. So whoever had made this picture knew what was going to happen to the river before it even happened.

Samuel sat down hard. He stared at the man’s lifeless face, then out at the river. The sluggish, blue-gray blur of the current muddled against the still, green backdrop, the colors rubbing together like layers of crayon in a child’s drawing. His mind shut down. All conscious thoughts ceased, all except for one that played on over and over again, an eternal heartbeat in a desolate, gray wasteland.
Someone knew. Someone knew.
Someone knew.

Then his mind began to slowly reawaken, and the other thoughts came back to him one by one.
But how could they know, how could they… unless… unless… unless the person who had made this picture had also done this thing to the river, the thing that made this man frown and shoot out his tongue, made his knees wobble as he began to stand, made his eyes widen and roll back in his head as he fell to the ground? Someone had done this thing to the river.

Samuel turned back to the colonist lying beside him. He had never seen a dead person before, much less seen anyone actually die, for the people of the colony died peacefully in their sleep at a predetermined age and were rolled into the sleeping hall floor when the beds were turned to be cleaned. As far as he could tell, the man had merely fallen into a deep, deep slumber from which he could not be roused. But Samuel knew, somehow, that his state was not a good one, was not at all desirable, was something to be avoided. The expression fixed on the man’s face tied Samuel’s innards in knots, yet he could not look away. It was the same expression that swept across his features as he fell, a look of ultimate pain and surprise, nothing like the blissful repose Samuel had noticed on the faces of colonists asleep in their beds. Something was very, very wrong, and it must be rectified as soon as possible. That one of the scraps of paper had specifically referenced this very incident made Samuel all the more uneasy.

Beside him, the river rolled on, smooth and steady as ever. Samuel had waded in its calm current just moments earlier. Yet something in the water had killed the colonist lying at his feet. If that something had been placed in the river itself, then it would wash away with the current in time and the water would be safe enough to drink. But when? And how would he know? Samuel did not dare drink from the river himself. He must assume the thing in the water was still there, find it and remove it. He walked briskly upstream along the river bank. Two more colonists lay motionless on the grass. He looked away and went on. In a few minutes he reached the point where the river escaped under the fence and away into the meadow beyond the colony. Another picture was caught in the junction between two fence posts.

Samuel recognized the circular image from the drawing of the poisoned river water. But he had no time for these pictures now. He knew he could not prevent the entire colony from drinking from the stream. He must do something at once, before too many colonists even had the chance to approach the river. He rested his arms on the upper cross pole of the fence and forced himself to think. Nothing came to him. His pulse throbbed in his head and echoed with the dull tick-tock of dampened bells. He stared down at the river where it surged under the fence. He was afraid to look behind him to see if more colonists had fallen along its banks. He must think. He must act. He must do something, anything. But still nothing came to him, only his own silent, rhythmic prodding.
Think… think… think…

For the first time in many weeks, Samuel did not know what to do. Before this moment, he had scarcely needed the help of another person. Now there was no one who could help him. His breaths came short and hard, as though he had just sprinted from one meal hall to the next. Little trickles of moisture began to run down his brow. But still his mind remained blank. He closed his eyes, and his thoughts grew even more empty. He felt his skull attempting to burst out of his skin. He tried to slow his breathing. He could control that. With his eyes closed, it became easier to block out everything else. Soon even the sound of the rushing river water faded from his thoughts. He focused on the air flowing in and out of his chest.
Breathe. In. Out. Slow. In. Out. In. Out.
He opened his eyes and looked out to where the river ran down from the windswept mountains in the distance. It was a strangely peaceful sight, so long as he ignored the thought of the invisible toxin that coursed through the bloodstream of the colony. His breaths grew calm.
In. Out. In. Out.
His vision refocused and the river and the meadow beyond the fence came back sharp and clear.

About twenty meters outside the fence line, he could just make out a thin black tube that ran up to the river and dipped down into the dancing current. Samuel hoisted himself up to the top of the fence. He had one leg over the upper cross pole when he stopped. He had never passed beyond the fence line before. As far as he knew, no one in the colony had. Even after he had removed dozens of poles from the fence, he had never strayed beyond the imaginary line that extended between support posts. He started to swing his leg back to the colony’s side of the fence when he realized he had no choice. He must investigate that tube.

Samuel tightened his grip on the fence and hoisted his other leg over the pole. He was outside the fence now, outside the colony. He hurried to where the tube ran deep into the river and yanked it from the water. A viscous brown liquid leaked out one drop at a time. Samuel followed the tube away from the river, holding the dripping end aloft to halt the flow of the liquid. The black tube snaked across the meadow with no end in sight. Samuel pointed the hose away from him and the brown liquid continued to stain the grass at his feet. He took the tube in both hands and bent it in half. The flow stopped. He unbent the tube and wound it up again, cinching it together in a simple knot. Then he used the window latch to dig a shallow hole in the ground, placed the knotted end of the tube inside and buried it.

When he was done, he stood up and gazed around. The meadow was empty. It looked identical to the meadow of the colony, but without the swarms of people. He skimmed his feet over the ground. The grass here felt rougher, the blades broader and sharper beneath his toes. The mountains surged upward in defiant challenge to the flat, green valley, and the late-afternoon shadows rippled over the flanks of the peaks to make them appear alive and muscled, crouched and waiting at the edge of the plain. Samuel felt himself longing to stay, to be completely alone for just a little while. But he knew he had to check on the river. He forced himself to turn back toward the fence and return to the colony.

As he swung over the cross pole, a colonist approached the river in the distance, moving with an unmistakable, light, careless gait. The figure did not scurry across the meadow but walked more upright, more relaxed, than the other colonists. It walked like Penny. In an instant, Samuel had leapt down from the fence and was running along the river, yelling as he ran.

Penny heard Samuel’s cries as he sprinted after her, and she waved in his direction and continued toward the river, gesturing for him to follow. He raced on headlong. Fear crept over her face as he closed in, but she drifted ever closer to the water. Samuel’s legs churned madly. For a moment he thought she might run, might make for the stream. He drove himself forward. Then he was on her, grabbing her around the waist and dragging her to the ground as a breathless shriek caught in her chest.

Samuel tried to explain. “The river… you can’t drink it… not yet…”

But as he held her to the ground, he saw another colonist kneel on the bank farther downstream and stoop forward to cup some water between his hands and raise it to his mouth. Samuel leapt to his feet and was about to call out a warning when he realized he needed to know if the river water was safe. By then it was too late. The colonist dipped his head forward and drank. Samuel waited, his head thumping. But the colonist stood and walked away without distress. Samuel slumped against Penny in relief as she fluttered beneath him, then he recovered himself and helped her to her feet.

“What is it?” she asked. “What is happening?”

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s nothing. Let us go and take a drink.”

They walked side by side to the river, knelt along the bank and dipped their hands into the cool rushing water. Samuel raised his hands first, paused a moment, then sipped the liquid from his palms. It tasted cold and fresh and wonderful. Penny drank, then stooped to fill her hands a second time, and Samuel quickly splashed another handful of water into his mouth. Penny sucked up her second palmful in one long, slow slurp, and Samuel felt the frantic rhythms of his body subside as she gazed at him over fingers cupped against her lips. He smiled at her and slid to his knees for one more drink.

XVIII

A
s the sun rose and t
he sky leaked blood-red the morning after the deaths at the river, Samuel removed another two dozen poles from the fence. Using the sheets from two beds, he lashed together six rafts, one for each colonist who had died, loaded each body onto a raft and pushed them into the middle of the river. The current carried them down to the edge of the colony, under the fence and away, across the outer meadow. Then he returned to his work at the meal halls, which he had neglected the previous evening. The boxes were full to the brim, and Samuel gave everyone double their normal ration to compensate for his absence.

The next day, Samuel finished his repairs on the remaining two collapsed bridges. When he had tied on the final piece of wood, Samuel waded out of the water and lay on the river bank, basking in the sun. He breathed easy now, felt his arms unclench and his fingers peel open. He knew he had just averted a major disaster two days before. Yet he had been up to the challenge once again. And now the bridges he had so long neglected were finally complete. He closed his eyes against the bright sunlight and stretched his limbs as far as they would go, spreading himself out on the soft grass and feeling with self-satisfied pleasure the lean tautness of the muscles in his narrow arms and legs, their every movement, contraction and relaxation a physical extension of the will of his mind.

He rolled onto his stomach, dug the six pieces of paper out of his pocket and laid them out on the ground in front of him. He had partially deciphered one of them already, the one indicating the crisis with the river water. Perhaps all of them were somehow related to the recent incidents in the colony. He picked up the drawing of the bed. This one might have something to do with the sleeping halls, but there was no other image on the scrap besides the bed. Samuel sorted through the other fragments and found one w
hose torn edges fit those of the bed image.

But even joining these pieces left a tear on one side of the combined picture. And the previous problem with the sleeping halls had nothing to do with people lying in beds; rather, the locked doors prevented the colonists from even reaching their beds. Samuel scanned the pictures once more and found one with a rectangular drawing on it. When he turned the torn edge to the right, it clearly resembled a door.

But the ripped edges did not line up with the person-bed picture, nor with any of the other drawings.

Samuel considered the remaining three pictures. Each showed one or more circular images with lines extending outward from the edges. The one that depicted the poisoned river water he understood. He studied the other two pictures, and one of them immediately became clear.

Two circles, one larger than the other. Two pointed lines between them about to stab into each other. How could he ignore the significance of this image after so much time spent dealing with circular meal cakes of different sizes, with colonists attacking one another over these inequalities?

Samuel grabbed the river image and held the two drawings together
in his hands. There could be no doubt now. Someone knew. Someone knew about these disasters before they occurred. Someone had made these pictures and left them throughout the colony, and then the incidents had happened just as the pictures indicated. Because the same person who drew these pictures had poisoned the river and locked the sleeping halls and changed the sizes of the meal cakes and…The colony was under attack. Samuel could not imagine why, but it was. It had been for days and days and days, all the way back to the First Hero and the broken food machines. And then she had disappeared. All the heroes had disappeared. Samuel had never known true malice before, but he sensed it now behind these attacks. And even as he groped for answers, there was a part of him that was afraid.

But above the fear, he felt the relentless urgency that dragged his heart on at breakneck speed, the poor, valiant thing thup-thup-thupping dreadfully as it struggled to catch up. The meal cakes, the river—the attacks were getting worse. Samuel focused on the drawings. The answers must be in the drawings. He could not believe otherwise. But he did not know what to make of them. They seemed incomplete, yet he knew he could not merely wait to find the right pictures to complete them. The next attack could come at any moment. Samuel gathered the pictures to his chest and lay back in the grass. The morning chill had worn off and he felt the sun’s heat full on his face. Through his half-opened eyelids, its rays shimmered in blurry, soft lines of light that quivered as the wind fluttered through his eyelashes. His vision throbbed and whitened, but he forced his eyes open until the light washed away the sky and the clouds and the trees overhead. He closed them and the imprint of the sun remained on the backs of his eyelids, little, hazy stars floating outward from the edges of the faint orange sphere. He watched them trickle off into darkness while the bright orb at the center pulsed out an endless trail of the flickering beacons.

His eyes snapped open. He shuffled through the pictures until he found the three with the mysterious circular symbols, held them up to the sky and looked at them through squinted eyes. They were suns. Samuel turned to the scrap of paper with the two suns, the river and the face. He recalled finding it the first time he had distributed meal cakes from his handmade box. The next day, he installed the other two food boxes, worked three meal halls at the evening meal and had grown so disgusted at dealing with the other colonists that he slept outside by the fence. He awoke from his nightmare before dawn with an idea for repairing the bridges. He had worked through the rest of the night and continued into the next day. He had completed his repairs on the first bridge that day and was in the middle of the second bridge when h
e saw the male colonist drink from the river and collapse on the spot.

Two suns. Two days. Two days had passed from the time he found the scrap of paper predicting the poisoned river to the actual incident. Samuel looked at the paper with the different-sized meal cakes. Three suns. He could not recall the exact amount of time between his finding the paper and the malfunction with the meal cakes, but three days seemed about right. So not only had someone known about these attacks beforehand, that same someone had planned and executed them on a precise day. On these papers, in these actions, Samuel had encountered a villainous mind far superior to any other in the colony, a mind well beyond even his own. In the other colonists, he faced a collective instinct with no more rational capabilities than a herd of cattle. But this new mind was that of a hunter, cold and systematic and calculating. Yet however ignorant they might be, the colonists did not deserve to be terrorized this way. Samuel sensed this fact at once. But they would not protect themselves.

Each day Samuel drew closer to his shadowy foe. Yet he knew he might wake tomorrow to find that a new disaster had occurred overnight. And then Samuel realized how this someone had caused these catastrophes without any witnesses. He had worked in the darkness, while the whole colony lay curled up in bed. And so to catch this person, to break the secret, he too would have to work at night, standing guard over the darkened meadow while all the other colonists were helplessly
asleep.

* * *

When the sun set that evening, Samuel began his new task. Within a few hours the moon rose pale blue and a sliver shy of full against the violet sky. Samuel walked the colony, traversing different paths across the meadow, the constant motion keeping his mind awake and alert. But nothing stirred in the colony that night, save for the grass and the leaves in the cool night breeze and the shimmering moonlight in the slowly churning river. When the sun rose, Samuel worked his three food halls, asked Penny to wake him in time for the midday meal and fell into bed in an empty sleeping hall.

When he explained to her that he had been awake all night, she offered at once to join him the next night, though he was not sure she fully grasped his reasons. Thereafter, she became his companion every night. In early evenings, when they both were not yet tired, they would walk together, sometimes talking, sometimes not. As the night wore on, they slept in shifts, waking each other every few hours. Samuel allowed Penny to sleep longer than he did, and slept fitfully during her turns on watch, for fear she would either fail to notice something amiss or be unable to wake him in time to stop it.

On the third night, when the moon had just risen and the other people of the colony had settled into their beds, Samuel and Penny were walking along the edge of the colony when Samuel paused for a moment to
look out at the wide, empty meadow beyond the fence. The moon was full now and cast the land in a pale silver light, illuminating a vast, lonely space, seemingly so far from the colony, though it lay just beyond the fence, mere steps away. He thought he had only stopped for an instant, but it must have been longer than that, for he felt Penny’s arm encircle his, saw her head turned up to him with a worried look on her face, heard her ask “What is it?” in the distant, muffled voice of one speaking underwater.

He could not take his eyes off the steely meadow. The dark mountains came alive in the moonlight, layered and jagged like uncut gems. “Did you even wonder…” he began, then stopped.

Her frown intensified. “Come.”

She tugged gently but firmly at the sleeve of his tunic. He looked at her, at her wide, glossy eyes and creased brow, then back at the meadow. He could have stayed there all night, let his mind wander out across the open plain. But he had no good reason for doing so, and at last he turned to follow her. They walked on in silence until they moved away from the fence line and neared the center of the colony.

“Why did you stop?” Penny asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “It was just so… beautiful… Do you ever think about what might be out there? Outside the fence?”

She stopped and stared at him with narrowed eyes. “I can see what is out there,” she said. “Grass and more grass, all the way to the mountains. It’s the same as it is here.”

“But then why is the fence there?”

She did not seem to understand.

“I mean, if things are the same outside the fence as they are inside, then why is the fence there at all?”

She began to walk again. He followed, waiting for her response.

After a moment, she answered grudgingly, “Whoever built it must have had a good reason.”

“But what is it? Don’t you want to know?”

“No. I never thought about it. It doesn’t matter. What if there is something bad out there?”

“There could be. But what if there’s something good?”

She hesitated. The moonlight shimmered in her eyes and made them all the more dark and empty for that glimmering, silver sparkle. She was about to answer when Samuel quieted her with a quick hiss and a hand over her lips. She started, but he rested his other hand on her back reassuringly and removed his grip from her mouth to point across the colony toward one of the meal halls. There, nex
t to the low-lying building abutting the hall, a pair of pale shadows flitted about in the faint light.