Our Dried Voices (13 page)

“But how do you know?”

“What we do every day. It’s where I found them.” He pointed at the now-connected scraps of paper, one after the other, beginning at the stick figure with the arrow pointing toward its head. “In the sleeping hall, in the food box in the meal hall, on the bridge in the meadow, on the creatures from the buildings by the meal halls, in the meadow by the river, in the meal hall, in my bed in the sleeping hall. We sleep, we eat, play in the meadow, eat again, back to the meadow, eat and go to sleep. The same thing every day.” He pointed at the pictures again in succession. “The head of the colony, where everything is controlled, it’s where they live. The ones who think, they sleep in the mountains where the sun goes down. There is a door there, and perhaps a picture like this one.” He pointed at the hand with the eye in the center. “That’s where I’m going. That’s where it ends. That’s where I will find answers.”

He gathered his blankets around him and moved toward the door.

Penny stood up. “Wait,” she said.

He stopped and looked back. He thought she would ask to go with him.

“It is almost night,” she said. “It will be dark and cold. Stay until morning. Please.”

Samuel hesitated. “Okay,” he said. He walked back toward her and gathered the scraps of paper into his tunic. “I will leave in the morning.”

Together they sat down again to wait out the rest of the day and night. When darkness fell she lay very close to him. Samuel slept quite soundly, Penny hardly at all.

XXIII

S
amuel decided to set out after the morning meal. Penny remained at his side throughout the morning, but said little. They passed out meal cakes together and sat alone at one of the tables in the middle of the hall. Penny held her cake in her lap while Samuel ate. When he had taken his final bite, she stood and unwrapped the blanket from her body, leaving only a single thin bedsheet covering her tunics.

“Here,” she said, as she extended it toward him. “You will need it more than me.”

He took the blanket and thanked her. Then she handed him her uneaten meal cake. He took that as well, stowed it in the pocket of his tunic and thanked her again. He stood up. They stared at each other for a long while, the only two people in the middle of the hall, the other colonists folded against the walls. An overwhelming feeling of pity came over Samuel. She was so close. He wished she could come with him right now. Yet something inside him told him that she was not yet ready to join him, that he must face this test alone.

“I’ll be back soon,” he said. Only as the words escaped his lips did he envision what might happen after he discovered whatever was out there, and he realized that he really did intend to return to her no matter what happened. Penny bobbed her head and her lips quivered, and Samuel felt something inside his chest shudder. He put his hands on her shoulders and squeezed them firmly.

“I will call you Penny,” he said, speaking her new name for the first time, “if you like it.”

“I do like it,” she replied, and her face brightened to leave only the smallest trace of lingering shadow.

Penny wrapped her arms around Samuel and pulled him close in an embrace, squeezing him as hard as she could. He wrapped his arms around her and squeezed back. Her neck smelled like the river at the first light of day, clean and still and shimmery in the early morning rays. She released him and nudged him toward the door.

“You must leave now,” she said. “It is a long way to go.” She did not look at him.

Samuel bowed his head and gathered his things. “Goodbye, Penny,” he said. “I will see you when I return.”

“Goodbye.”

He stepped outside and took his first steps into the snow and did not look back.

* * *

That had been some hours ago. The snowfall had continued, unabated, throughout the night and the drifts now rose almost to Samuel’s knees. The soft white layers had transformed the meadow and reminded him of the foam spurting from the hole in the meal hall floor. The thick snow smoothed the gentle rise and fall of the land and clung to the trees, the old, gnarled branches reborn in sheets of purest ivory. Samuel passed beyond the fence line. The extra poles hung, half-removed from their supports, wooden skeletons peeking through white funeral shrouds, buried and forgotten long ago. The sun had started its descent in the sky, invisible behind the dark clouds though it lent them a faint, smoky glow that extended from above Samuel’s head and out in the direction toward which he now walked. The snow had fallen, and continued to fall, over the meadow outside the fence as well, and over the mountains in the distance, covering much of the hard black rock in soft white folds, except for a few sharp streaks of ebony where the rock was too narrow to hold the fluffy powder and had sliced through the drifts.

The bedding Samuel had wrapped around his body and feet was wet all the way through and he was soaked to the bone. He had long since lost feeling in his face and toes. He kept his hands wrapped inside the blankets but his fingers tingled with the onset of numbness as well. Yet he pressed on. He still carried Penny’s morning meal in the pocket of his tunic, and though he was quite hungry, he was determined to save it as a reward to himself once he reached the mountains. He refused to stop now, banished from his mind any thought of turning back. He had come this far, and to go back now would not just be to admit defeat, but to resign himself, Penny and all the other colonists to a slow death in a cramped meal hall, trapped inside forever by the snow and cold. Besides, he had quickly learned he only grew colder as his pace slackened, and so he made every effort to move as fast as he could, straight as an arrow toward the black mountains and the pale gray sky.

The afternoon wore on. Fatigue set in. Samuel pressed on, forgetting everything he had left behind him, his mind occupied only by a concerted resolve to ignore all thoughts of his painfully freezing body and focus on the sight of the ever-approaching mountains ahead. His stomach began to growl insistently. He thought about eating some of the meal cake, but he could not bring himself to expose his hands to the elements in order to raise the food to his mouth. Soon the old feeling of nausea returned and replaced the hunger in his stomach, though there were no colonists around this time to cause it. He shivered violently. The sun continued its descent in the sky and the faint glow behind the clouds settled over the mountains. The temperature continued to drop. In a few hours it would be night, and Samuel knew he must make the mountains soon after sunset, as he would not long survive the even more frigid chill of the darkness.

To his mind, his pace had not lessened, his direction remained true. But his footprints in the snow behind him told a different story. They had begun to waver of late, to veer haphazardly from side to side, and the space between each footfall grew less and less as he stumbled on. When the sun neared the horizon, the mountains ahead of him grew blurry to his sight as the lightness in the sky spread around the snow-capped peaks and lent them a faint aura of gold. The sun set abruptly, touching the mountains and dipping behind them in a matter of minutes, and the sky turned at once from gray to black. Within a few moments of darkness, Samuel could barely keep his eyes open. His footsteps became shorter and more unsteady. His hands were frozen into fists inside the sopping blankets and they trembled uncontrollably. And always, all around him, there was the cold, borne on the hard and frigid wind, rising out of the snow drifts as each step carried his foot deep into the icy crystalline powder, pressing down from the darkness of the sky as his frozen blankets bound him in an icy embrace.

He walked on, forced himself to put one foot in front of the other in a constant willing of motion, a painfully conscious signal passing over and over again from brain to nerve to leg. Each step was heavier and more sluggish than the previous. A cloud of warmth rose from his still-queasy stomach and spread into his chest and face. His head dragged with exhaustion and his eyes blurred. The snow at his feet appeared soft and inviting. He imagined falling asleep next to Penny curled up in a bed of clean, white, downy snow. He felt his body grow warmer, like feeling of the first rays of sun prickling his skin on a cool morning, except now the soft heat spread outward from deep inside of him with a tingling, numbing sensation. He wanted so badly to go to sleep, to slip into peaceful oblivion. But a whispered, insistent voice in the back of his mind kept reminding him there was something urgent he must do… if he could only remember what that was.

He stumbled and nearly fell face down in the snow. A cry rang out in his mind.
Step
. That was all. The warmth continued its crawl through his body. He could not feel his fingers, but at least they were no longer stiff and cold. It was like they had been mercifully removed from his hand, like he had slipped outside his body and was looking down on himself, watching this poor creature stagger across the barren and snowy plain, pitying himself, wishing he would just lie down and sleep so it would all be over.
Step
. There it was again. He focused on it, kept it always in mind, even as the insidious warmth and fatigue threatened to envelop him. In a way, the warmth was even worse than the cold.
Step.
The mountains were close now. In the cold he was still alive, painfully alive. But the warmth numbed the pain and numbed his mind, desensitized him completely. It made his body lord over his mind, blurred and confused his senses.
Step.

He was in their shadow now. Their presence obscured any lingering trace of light from the black and cloudy sky.
Step
. His next step was upward. He was climbing now, hiking through a narrow trail he could not see, only feel. He slipped on icy snow layered upon hard, smooth, sharp rock.
Step
. It was the one thing that mattered, the most fundamental of all conscious decisions, the fulcrum upon which all will, action and life balanced. He fell to his hands and knees and crawled over the slick, jagged incline.
Step
. The sharp rocks cut into his hands and knees, but his frozen limbs did not feel the pain. He did not feel the blood pool in his palms and ooze down his legs, for his body was already soaked.
Step
. Not once did he think of how much farther he must go. The ground beneath his hands faded from his bleary sight and he saw before him a horde of dumb, shapeless, rabid creatures, made of nothing but slavering mouths and thousands upon thousands of grabbing hands, of warm, soft, unraveling blankets, and one word played over and over in his mind.
Step. Step. Step
.

From somewhere beyond him there came a dull thud and he could crawl no farther. He sat back on his heels and looked up. He had bumped his head against an unyielding barrier. Running a hand over it, he found it perfectly smooth without the flinty edges of the rocks beneath him. It was a door carved into the mountain, and drawn above it in white chalk on the rock face and barely visible to his delirious, blurred vision, was a hand with an eye in the center. Samuel grabbed the handle and pulled with all his might. The door crept open. With the last reserve of strength he could muster, Samuel rolled his numbed body over the threshold. The door closed behind him with a stolid thump, but he did not hear it. He was already fast asleep.

* * *

Samuel awoke to find himself in a dimly lit room. He was still cold, but sensation had returned to his limbs, and they ached with a blunt throbbing. Scabs had begun to form on his hands and knees. His head hurt and his mouth was dry. He sat up and pulled the meal cake from his pocket and began to eat. He did not realize until he took his first bite how hungry he was. His body felt limp and thoroughly worn out. He ate and studied his surroundings while he recovered his strength. He was in a dark, circular room, illuminated faintly by several video screens covering the walls. A thick, waist-high platform covered with several rows of lights, buttons, knobs and switches extended outward from the walls around the room. The low hum of electrical equipment was the only sound in the otherwise empty chamber. The videos showed various images of a snow-covered meadow and some buildings, pictures so vivid that Samuel could even make out the snow falling from the sky. He initially mistook these images for windows, until he realized they were actually moving pictures of the colony. There were several of these videos, each offering a different vantage point: the interiors and exteriors of the meal halls, sleeping halls and the rooms with the strange caged-in creatures and floor-to-ceiling plants, the snowy meadow and gray-clouded sky, and even the river, now frozen solid and crisscrossed by Samuel’s refurbished bridges.

Samuel pulled himself to his feet and staggered about the room, overwhelmed by the abundance of technologies beyond his wildest imagination. Each step in the long journey that eventually led him to this place was more impressive than the last, from the liquid-filled space beneath the meal hall floors, to the carefully calibrated food machines, to the entire horrifyingly clinical operation inside the secret rooms next to the meal halls. And though the actual details of the process were still beyond his understanding, Samuel realized that from this room a person could control every single mechanical aspect of the colony, including—he scarcely believed the thought as it first entered his mind—the actual weather.

Samuel hurried to the console that wrapped in one continuous arc around the circular room and stopped in front of a video of the snow still falling steadily over the colony. A multitude of buttons covered the console beneath this video, and in the midst of these buttons were four sliding controls, each with a switch that could be moved gradually between two extremes. Next to the top switch were five vertical dotted lines on the right side and nothing on the left. The second switch had a picture of a sun on the left, and on the right a puffy shape composed of many incomplete overlapping circles that somewhat resembled a cloud. The third had a red circle on the left and a blue one on the right. The fourth had nothing on the left, and on the right were five horizontal lines, which split into upward and downward curves at their rightmost ends. Each switch had been pushed to the far right of the control.

Samuel put his hand on the top control and tentatively slid it all the way to the left. Nothing happened at first on the video screen. Then, ever so gradually, the snow began to lessen, growing lighter and lighter, until within a few minutes it had stopped entirely. Encouraged, Samuel slid the second switch all the way to the left as well. On the video screen the dark clouds began to lighten to white, and then they dispersed altogether as the sun pushed its way through, bringing with it a clear, bright, blue sky. Samuel reached for the third switch and began to move it toward the left. The pictures did not change. He slid the control all the way to the left. Still nothing. He left it there and moved the fourth switch all the way to the left as well. Nothing happened on the video of the sky, but on the other screens, Samuel could see the trees in the meadow fall still as the winds ceased. To his great disbelief, Samuel realized he was actually controlling the weather in the colony. The first, second and fourth switches must control the snow, clouds and wind. He guessed that the third switch must affect the temperature, and he moved it to the center of the control.

Samuel stared at the video screens around him in awe. In the meal halls, the colonists began to stir. On one screen, Samuel thought he saw Penny rise from her seat against a wall. He rushed to the video and studied it, but the image was not detailed enough to know for certain. He scanned the console hurriedly, looking for some way to enhance the picture, but he could not make sense of the other controls. The lone figure on the screen stepped lightly to the hall door and pushed it open. Samuel spun around and found a video of the meal hall exterior as the door opened and a figure emerged. He felt his face grow warm and the meal cake turned over in his stomach. It must be Penny; it could be no one else. She gazed around her and spread out her arms as if to embrace the warm air. Samuel imagined her face alight in the sun’s fresh rays, but she was just a tiny figure against the wide expanse of the meal hall. Then she walked away from the door and out into the meadow where patches of green grass had started to appear beneath the melting snow. She moved carefully at first, as if stepping out into the world for the first time. Samuel reached out and touched her picture on the screen. Penny walked to the edge of the image and then off it. Samuel turned to find her on another video, following her path on the screens in a circle around the room as she strolled across the meadow.