Our Dried Voices (11 page)

“Who are they?” she whispered.

But he hushed her with a wave of his hand and was gone, scuttling across the meadow toward the distant figures, stooped low to the ground as he darted from tree to hill, doing his best to go unnoticed. She followed him, less gracefully and rather less quietly. Yet their efforts at stealth were in vain, as all at once the figures turned and seemed to glimpse Samuel’s approaching form. In a flash they were gone, racing headlong across the meadow. Samuel stopped for a moment and marveled at their grace, the raw, smooth motions of their bodies as they ran, the sharp edges of their limbs as they sliced through the dark sky and flashed dimly in the moonlight. Then he took off after them, his strides somehow just a bit less refined.

The two darkened figures reached the fence, and each of them vaulted it in one smooth motion from an all-out sprint, placing a hand deftly on the uppermost cross pole as they leaned sideways to swing their legs over, then landing softly on the other side and rebounding instantly into a new stride. Samuel vaulted the fence nearly as well, but it was clear that he could not gain on them. Almost as soon as he landed, the figures split up abruptly and raced off across the meadow in different directions.

Samuel knew the chase was over. He slowed to a stop and stared after the figures as they fled across the wide-open meadow. In a minute they were gone, lost in the darkness and the shadow of the mountains, but in that instant Samuel knew with absolute certainty that these shadowy figures were the foes he had sought these past weeks. They were responsible for the attacks on the colony. They were responsible for the drawings he had discovered. And as Samuel recalled the way they split off so suddenly in a burst of perfect synchronicity that recalled the same degree of order and detail in the pictures on the little scraps of paper, he guessed that these drawings were not merely portents of barbarous things to come, but a carefully devised system of messages by which these people communicated their plans to one another. And now it fell to Samuel to decipher their messages and stop their attacks before further damage was done.

XIX

F
rom that night on, Samuel and Penny focused their vigils on the colony’s seven meal halls. They patrolled the meadow under darkness, rarely sleeping at all now, and remained awake through the morning meal to distribute cakes at the three halls. Then they fell asleep in a vacant sleeping hall or the shadiest spot in the meadow. They awoke again for the midday meal (Samuel oftentimes rising from a restless sleep even before the sound of the bells), slept through the afternoon, awoke for the evening meal and waited for the sun to set before they began their nighttime rounds once more.

Two uneventful days passed after Samuel and Penny sighted the shadowy figures lurking around the meal hall. On the second evening they distributed meal cakes together at the three halls. They had further developed their complementary working rhythm in the past few days, one bending to remove a cake while the other passed one out, each setting aside broken-off portions to be combined with others to make whole cakes, each of them silently attuned to the actions of the other. Together they had managed to cut the time required for the entire process nearly in half.

When their work was done, they exited the hall together, their own cakes in hand. A white rain fell from a slate gray sky. On some unspoken signal they began to run, racing across the meadow toward the nearest sleeping hall for a brief rest before their long nighttime vigil, their bare feet skimming over the slick matted grass, eager to be free of their burden once more, if only until the next day. Dampened colonists coagulated around the hall door ahead of them, and they slid to a stop and gulped greedily at the sweet, wet air.

“Look!” Penny grabbed Samuel’s arm and pointed into the crowd.

Before Samuel had a chance to pick out anything, she darted toward the sleeping hall door, snaking through the funneled queues of putty-colored flesh. He lost her for a moment as she stooped to the ground and he stumbled forward numbly. Then her arm shot out of the crowd and her bright face bobbed above bare heads and her crystal teeth flashed in excitement as she jumped up and down to find him. She wove her way back against the current, waving aloft another scrap of paper.

Samuel did not wait for Penny to reach him. He raced past her to the hall, careening through the crowd and into the doorway. The colonists entering the hall filtered throughout the room and mingled instantly with the others inside, like molecules of gas dispersing into empty space. Samuel stopped inside the door, unsure of whom to chase. Colonists shuffled about all around him, their shoulders stooped and heads bowed. He leapt after the nearest one, an elderly male. The man made a half-hearted attempt to scurry away but Samuel was on him in an instant, seizing him by the cloth of his tunic and spitting out a flurry of questions.

“Who are you? Where do you come from? Why—”

The man stared back at Samuel, eyes wide and mouth quivering. His knees buckled, and Samuel felt the man’s entire weight supported in his arms. His voice trailed off and he let the man go. He slumped heavily to the ground, his rear end striking the floor first, his limbs falling limply about him to thunk against the hard floor.

Samuel stood over the man, not even seeing him. Around him, the other colonists had scattered into corners and behind beds. All eyes rested on him. A few tears seeped onto the cheeks of the man at his feet. Samuel left him splayed on the ground and walked back to the entrance of the hall. Penny held out the drawing she had recovered. It was another person.

Samuel fished the other scraps from his pocket. He had found a similar picture already. And as he held them in his hands, he was able to piece together these two images, along with the drawing of the bed, to form a complete picture.

Yet even this whole drawing remained meaningless. A person in a bed and a person standing next to it. One with a large head and one with an arrow pointing at his. But no indication of any forthcoming attack, other than a vague reference to the sleeping halls. Penny had nothing to offer either. Samuel was exhausted. He tucked the papers back in his pocket and stepped out into the twilit meadow. The rain had slowed to a soft mist that coated his face in tiny sparkling droplets. A few hours remained before darkness fell and he knew he needed to sleep. The other colonists had already turned their backs on them as they reentered. They napped or chattered to no one in particular or played silly, apathetic games under their bedsheets. Samuel fell into bed in a vacant row, Penny in the bed beside him. He would have plenty of time to ponder his latest discovery during the
long
night.

* * *

They slept
a few hours and woke again as the sun set and the rain ceased. When darkness fell, they began their vigil. Samuel studied the papers intermittently by the light of the waning moon, his ears always pricked up, eyes searching the meadow at every hint of sound or motion. But it was an uneventful night without even the slightest sign of anything amiss in the colony. And still Samuel made no headway on the mysterious drawings. At daybreak they rested again and waited for the morning meal. They passed out meal cakes and ate their own and
fell asleep out by the fence line. About an hour later they were awakened by the sound of distant screams.

XX

S
amuel awoke with a start, shook groggy sleep from his head and raced off in the direction of the screams. Penny became tangled in her bedsheets in her haste, but she unraveled herself and followed as fast as she could. As he approached the nearest meal hall, the point from which the cries seemed to emanate, Samuel slowed to a stop, stunned into stillness by what he saw before him. All around the meal hall, a group of strange, large brown creatures plodded about on all four legs, bending their necks toward the ground to bite off hunks of vegetation. Their legs were extremely thin and knobby, with joints that seemed to bend the wrong way, and the creatures’ heavy, cumbersome, swaying bodies appeared disproportionately large by comparison. Each creature was slightly longer from the end of its rear to the front of its chest than Samuel was tall, and had a long, thick neck and a triangular-shaped forehead with prominent brows that slanted down toward its nose and mouth. They had eyes mounted on the sides of their heads, so that it seemed quite difficult for them to look directly ahead, and their entire bodies were covered in some thin, fibrous substance, almost like dense, brown, fine-bladed grass. Beyond these creatures, he could see a handful of terrified colonists fleeing across the meadow.

Penny came up beside him. “What are they? Where did they come from?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” he replied. Besides their fellow colonists, they had never seen any other sentient beings before in their lives.

The bizarre creatures paid them no mind. They swirled in a lazy herd about the meadow, stooping and chewing and snuffling, overtaking Samuel and Penny like puffy clouds carelessly blotting out the sun. Samuel receded as the creatures first approached, but they seemed harmless and he knew he would have to deal with them somehow. He took a hesitant step into the herd as it lapped around him. Penny grabbed half-heartedly at his arm, but he slipped out of her grasp without any effort. She followed in his wake. One of the animals looked at Samuel, its head turned sideways as its flat, glassy eye took him in but showed no more interest than if he were a tree or stone or blade of grass. Samuel stared back at the creature.

“Hello,” Samuel said. The creature chewed slowly. “Are you a dog?”

The creature gazed at him for a few seconds more, then turned away and continued its aimless pacing. Samuel looked back at Penny. She stood frozen. Across the meadow more groups of these animals plodded about, calm and unhurried, pausing occasionally to lower their heads and eat some grass or take a drink at the river. There were no other colonists in sight. One of the creatures passed very near to Samuel and he reached out a hand to let the coarse fibers covering its body brush through his fingers. The animal hardly noticed. The small herd engulfed them on all sides, neither advancing nor keeping their distance, a current pulsing against a pair of lily pads, wherever the mindless whim of nature may take it.

The scrap of paper tied to one of the creature’s necks hit Samuel like a splash of icy water to recall him from a dream. He leapt forward and grabbed it, studied the drawing it bore in the now-distinctive scrawl of black crayon.

Penny peered over his shoulder and asked, “What is it?”

But Samuel could make no sense of the drawing. He tucked it away and stared around him, overcome by the significance of these animals milling about the meadow, by the concerted will it must have taken to bring them here. Who were these people? The stunning nature of the action, the very brazenness of displaying their message on one of the creatures they had so miraculously produced—they knew he had chased them from the meal halls the other night and they were taunting him now, daring him to even try to come so close to catching them again.

The meal halls. He had seen them gathered outside one of the meal halls that night. It was as good a place to begin as any. Everything seemed in order when he reached the nearest hall. The door was closed and there was nothing amiss with the building’s exterior. Samuel circled to the back of the hall to investigate the smaller building that abutted it. Its walls were bare and polished, the same blank, off-white color as the hall, and as he came to the third side of the little building, he noticed a slight vertical crack in the exterior. He dug the broken window latch from his pocket and inserted it into this narrow seam. With considerable effort, he managed to pry back a nearly invisible panel that lay flush with the wall of the building. He slipped his fingers into the gap and opened the door wide enough to step inside.

A floor-to-ceiling chain-link fence divided the entire interior of the building and sectioned off about a quarter of the room. The midday sun beamed in through a full glass roof just as strongly as it did outside, and rows of what looked like tiny suns lined the walls and produced such an abundance of light that Samuel was forced to shade his eyes. Rows and rows of various potted plants, species Samuel had never even imagined existed, packed the majority of the room. In each row the plants rested on a single continuous shelf, which inclined gradually all the way up to the glass ceiling, zig-zagging back and forth between the near and far walls. A metal grate with square holes the size of one of Samuel’s fingers divided the other quarter of the room into two levels, one on the ground and another just above Samuel’s head. Two troughs filled with water lined the long wall of this section, one on each of the two floors. A single brown creature, identical to those in the meadows, shuffled about all alone on the upper level.

For a brief moment, the room was still and quiet, as though purposely giving Samuel ample opportunity to take it all in. Then all at once, everything sprang into motion. To Samuel’s right, the rows of plants began to move back and forth and slightly upward on shelves similar to the sliding platforms Samuel had observed in the tunnels of the food machines. As each box of plants reached the top of the room the motion of the conveyor pushed it into a hole in the opposite wall. At the same time, a panel in the floor next to each shelf opened, and a new box of mature plants was loaded into the vacant space at the bottom of each row.

Samuel watched, mesmerized, until a groan of protest from the animal to his left broke his dumbfounded awe. He turned and saw a metal partition that ran the width of the pen had eased away from the far wall and was methodically pushing across the ground floor of the cage. On the second level, a similar panel drove out from the near wall in the opposite direction, forcing the hapless creature toward the far end of the cage, which narrowed to the width of a single animal. The creature turned to face the panel, pitted its shoulder against the cold steel and dug its feet into the grated floor. The bright metal barrier halted for a moment against this weight, but then the creature’s small, hard, circular feet slipped on the grille of the floor, and the panel pressed forward. The poor animal stumbled backward. It recovered and dug its shoulder against the barrier with even greater desperation, but its first effort had sapped its strength. Its persistent moans increased in pitch and breathlessness as the panel drove inexorably forward to push the animal across its cage, one centimeter at a time.

Samuel stepped farther into the building, drawn by helpless fascination to the creature’s plight. From his position on the ground, looking up through the double grate of the fence and the upper floor, Samuel did not have the best view of the unfolding action. But he could see well enough. And he could hear everything: the thump of the animal’s shoulder as it launched itself against the steadily advancing panel, its feet scrabbling vainly against the frictionless floor, the pleading, wheezing breaths that quickly faded as exhaustion took hold; all of these sounds juxtaposed against the conspicuous absence of noise from the panel—no humming or churning of gears, no scraping of metal, just the slow and silent march of steel, as inevitable as time itself.

Its shoulder pressed against the metal barrier, the creature’s hindquarters entered the hole in the far wall first. A sudden whirring and grinding emanated from beyond the wall. For just a moment, the animal fell silent and its forelegs stopped pawing at the ground. Then the hush was broken by the most horrible sound Samuel had ever heard. The creature cried out in wordless agony, in one loud, long scream of pain and fear, a sound many humans have long believed animals cannot make, the sound that once raced, in an instant, through the minds of tens of thousands of men as they felt the cold steel of the guillotine blade bite into the backs of their necks and saw Death, hooded and menacing, lurking before them. Yet that silent cry lasted but an instant in the mind of the dying, while the sound made by the creature in that secret room went on and on and on. Its hind legs already devoured by the hole, the creature spun its forelegs over the slick grate and screamed and screamed. Samuel raced to the fence, dug his fingers into the spaces between the metal wires, and began to climb. But there was nothing he could do. He had not climbed half a meter when the screams became too much, his limbs grew weak, and he could climb no higher, go no closer.

He fell to the ground and just managed to catch himself on his feet. The screams grew louder and louder, limitless in their sheer panicked anguish. He jumped and danced to peer through the grate and fence that obstructed his view, though he was not sure he really wanted to see. The cries stopped. There was nothing, not even an echo, as though that dark hole had swallowed up sound itself. The creature was gone, save for a faint red mist and a few tufts of the coarse, brown fibers of its body that wafted down through the grate. Samuel’s knees buckled and he felt as though something inside of him had imploded and collapsed. Inside the cage, a trap door slid open and a new creature stepped out of the floor, spasmodically shaking its body to remove some unknown liquid from its fur. Samuel scarcely noticed. He stumbled to the door and out into the sunlight of the meadow. Penny stood there, and he did not know if she had followed him inside. He fell to his knees and was sick in the grass.

* * *

Penny stood over Samuel as he shuddered and spat the acrid taste from his mouth. In truth, he had not yet considered exactly what happened to the creature as it was pushed into the hole. His sickness was a purely visceral reaction to the horrifying sights and sounds of the incident. But now the grim realization dawned on him. And perhaps he had recognized it the whole time, perhaps the thought had lingered in the depths of his subconscious throughout the whole gruesome scene, for he knew now with absolute clarity that the creature in that room was no more, that whatever happened to it in there was the same thing that happened to the male who drank the bad river water and collapsed to the ground with his eyes wide and staring and fell into a sleep that was not really sleep, a sleep from which he would never awake.

Samuel gazed down at his own vomit in the green grass, then looked up and saw the blurry images of the brown creatures stooping to eat that same grass, and as the colors smeared together in a terrible, ugly mixture, at last Samuel knew what he had eaten three times a day, every day, for the whole length of his existence. He felt as though he would be sick again but his stomach was already empty. Several minutes passed before he recovered enough strength to stand. He needed to get away from it all, the room, the creatures, whatever colonists might still be lurking about. As best he could, he hobbled across the colony to the fence line and sat with his back against one of the posts. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, forced his thoughts over the sickness coursing through him. The late morning sun streamed down, hot and dry, upon his forehead. The wind died in the air.

He could not ignore the frightful origin of the meal cakes. Yet he knew nothing else. They were all he had ever eaten. And the duty that had plagued him the last several days, the thought of the whole colony thrown into starvation, crept up around the edges of his disgust. Several hundred colonists required food each day. And even with his new system of distributing equal cakes at three different meal halls, Samuel knew not every colonist received a normal ration. Yet now that he had learned something of how the meal cakes were made, to condemn those strange creatures to that same fate, that same fear and agony and death, one after another, day after day…

He felt Pe
nny’s hand on his arm, opened his eyes and saw her seated beside him, her mouth twisted into a wrenching look of concern such as he had never seen before. Whatever might be said of these creatures, however innocent they might be, by all indications they were not like her. They would never be able to converse with him as she did, they would never care about him as she did, they would never value him for his mind as she did, because they did not speak, listen, love, think or value as she did, as he did. Yet still they did not deserve what end would eventually befall them. And for this he respected them all the more, thanked them reverently in his thoughts. Perhaps that was the difference: that he could respect them, thank them for their sacrifice. He did not know. But he could not let Penny suffer as they suffered. For now he could think of no other answer. But he vowed to himself to find another way, a better way.