Our Dried Voices (3 page)

When the bells sounded, a few colonists drifted into the meal halls, acting out of boredom or habit or the faintest ember of hope that the food machines might have been miraculously repaired. And in fact, when the first person stepped up to the hole in the back wall, the red light flashed and there was a familiar clicking and whirring sound. And then a plate of food appeared in the opening.

III

W
ithin a few days it seemed nothing out of the ordinary had happened in the colony. Laughter returned to the meadow. The big cottony clouds that signaled the next day’s rain rolled in and blotted out the sun’s heat. All the food machines functioned regularly once more. Most colonists took their meals and ate outside, reveling in the idyllic weather. Samuel arrived late to the midday meal. He ate his cake and walked along the river that wound idly through the center of the colony, occasionally stopping to dip a toe into his shimmering reflection. Groups of colonists splashed about in the shallow water, their wordless, playful cries diluted by the drowsy babble of the stream. Others napped in the shadow of the halls or the few trees dotting the meadow. Samuel wiped crumbs from his hands and turned away from the river for a shady tree of his own.

A female colonist intercepted him, stepped into his path without a word and batted her eyelashes, her face blank save for an overwrought attempt at a fetching half-smile. Samuel would not have recognized her a second time. She moved a step closer to him as they converged at the edge of a low-hanging tree. Reached out, laid her hand on his inner thigh. He slipped a hand under her tunic. Pushed her into the shadows. There was the slight curve of her breast that marked her sex. Not that it mattered.

Under the tree it was stagnant, windless. The willowy boughs drooping from the gnarled and stunted trunk washed away the sounds of the meadow. Their brown skin rubbed and smeared. Their breaths commingled. Shallow. Rapid. Climbing. Their heat filled the emerald shade and cocooned around them. Mottled leaf-shadows wavered across their bodies until they shuddered and fell still. They shared one final breath together, their chests falling heavily.

They separated intact. Samuel picked up her tunic and pulled it over his head. Neither noticed. She donned his tunic over smooth skin that glistened with sweat and ran her hands down the front, ironing out invisible creases. It was just slightly loose on her.

She turned her moony face toward him and forced another grin. “Thuvyuvarymuch. Lunkyubye,” she said, repeating a variation of words Samuel had spoken many times before.

The branches swept closed behind her. Samuel ran his tongue around the inside of his dry mouth. He walked to the river and urinated into the current. Then he knelt and drank. The slow tide gurgled as it lapped over the bank. He swished some water around in his mouth, imitating its sound. He bent again and rinsed the sweat from his face. The stream slipped on immutable, bearing his heat away.

* * *

In the evening the air was cool and fine. The clouds darkened with the sunset and stained the land a faded silver. Tomorrow it would rain. Samuel had slept the rest of the afternoon under the smallest and last unoccupied tree in the meadow. He awoke before the sound of the evening bells and was the first to arrive at the nearest meal hall. He ate at a table by himself, before any other colonist could join him. Outside the sky coalesced from ink and milk to solid granite. Samuel strolled through the crisp breeze, content in the passage of another day.

The other colonists scampered through the meadow, oblivious to their recent brush with disaster. In the measured transition of sun to moonlight, the meal halls glowed faintly opalescent and the river sparkled as it meandered through the colony, under the simple wooden fence that enclosed their little plot of meadow and away toward the sleepy mountains in the distance. Beyond the fence, there was only gray and empty darkness, kilometers of untouched meadow all the way out to the shadowed peaks on every side. Samuel played a game with himself, picking out the faint jagged horizon between earth and rock, then closing and opening his eyes to find it again. Open. Close. Open. Close. The dim silver line winked at him from out of the gloom.

Night blackened the sky within a few moments, then broke into faint streaks of light behind the thick clouds. Lightning, distant and beautiful under a silk cloak. Samuel turned away from the mountains and fell in with the other colonists already on their way to the nearest sleeping hall. They chattered eagerly, giggled together, their voices tripping over one another like the days rolling over and onward. They crawled into soft, pillowed beds with fresh, starched sheets. Samuel fell asleep almost instantly. He did not dream. A night breeze whispered through the windows of the hall as the thunder lolled a faint lullaby.

IV

T
he next morning it rained in the colony, just as it had seven days ago, and seven days before that. And then the storms continued into the next day. On rainy days, the colonists typically took refuge in the sleeping halls, which remained open all day long. But when the first colonists raced across the sopping meadow after their morning meal on the second cloud-darkened day, they found the hall doors closed and locked. Two straight days of storms was unprecedented in the colony’s memory. Locked sleeping halls were unreal. By nightfall of the second day, the doors still did not open and the rain kept falling.

On the third morning, the vast majority of the colonists nestled damply in the seven meal halls around the colony. The soft drizzle continued on unabated. Fortunately, the food machines remained functional. The people of the colony may have forgotten the previous incident, but the same sense of foreboding returned to them now. They shrunk against the walls, their eyes downcast, most of them alone. No one moved. No one said a word. The stark furniture waited empty in the middle of the hall as the high windows wept in little gray rivulets.

Samuel sat on the floor in one of the halls and scanned the long celestial-blue room. He found himself expectant, almost curious, as though he was sitting down to hear the beginning of a long story. He had been one of the first to enter the halls the previous day after he had tried two of the sleeping halls and found their doors locked. Unlike most of the other colonists, who suffered their cold and damp conditions hopelessly curled up in the corners of the hall, Samuel paced the length of the room until his clothes and skin were dry. Despite the incessant rain, the temperature in the colony had not dropped, and it remained warm enough inside the hall to keep him comfortable.

The midday meal came and went. The colonists navigated the perimeter of the hall to retrieve their cakes and returned to their previous seats against the wall to eat in silence. Samuel ate and traced his foot against the edge of a seam in the floor surrounding the nearest set of table and chairs. He noticed that these strange lines drew a square around each set of furniture in the entire hall. He had just finished the last bite of his meal cake when the woman with the copper eyes entered the meal hall. She stalked up and down the length of the room, her soaked tunic dripping a trail on the floor as it dried. The other colonists watched her from lowered eyes as they crouched deeper into their own bodies. She ignored them. Samuel watched her as well, and a rather pleasant, cool, exhilarating feeling crept up from his stomach. The woman paced for several minutes—back and forth, back and forth—her eyes focused on the empty air a few feet in front of her. When she came to a stop, her body seemed to grow straighter and more rigid, though she had not stooped over at all as she walked. She reached into the pocket of her tunic and dug out some crumpled fragment of thin material and studied it in her hands. The colonists murmured to themselves in broken phrases tinged with obvious distress.“

“walkingwalkingstopwalkwalkingstopwalkingwalk…”

“…notherewhyhernothernotherewhyhere…”

“…gowaygowaygowaygoway…”

Samuel eased to his feet as the woman resumed her pacing, her light steps carrying her effortlessly across the great hall as she wove a straight path through the bolted-down furniture without ever appearing fully aware of its presence. She stopped in the center of the hall. The murmurs ceased. The woman glanced at the colonists strewn around the edges of the room, as if just noticing them for the first time. It appeared to Samuel—though he could never be sure—that her eyes rested on his for the briefest of moments, that they flashed that now-familiar glint of copper, and that her icy veneer was momentarily broken by a faint grin. She moved to the door. Without warning, it slammed shut in her face and she stopped in her tracks. A muffled creaking sound filled the room. The woman stepped to the door and pushed it open and the noise stopped. She slipped outside and was gone.

Throughout the hall, the other colonists resumed their bowed-head meditations with evident relief. Samuel walked to the door, clumsily dodging the furniture in his path, and blinked away the rain as he stepped outside. The sticky odor of sweet detritus struck him instantly. Everything was dead slate fog, the rain droplets materializing out of an earthbound cloud. The mountains were invisible. The few short trees oozed jadeite boughs to the muddied meadow that squished under his feet. Samuel could barely make out the distant figure picking her way across the slick turf. He wiped water from his brow and set out after her.

Upon first glance, the woman appeared to walk with no particular direction in mind. She meandered between buildings, ran her hands over their walls, stopped to stare at the sky. Yet her steps were quick and decisive; her gaze never wavered from its target. Samuel followed her without knowing why. The rain continued to fall in slow sheets. Even through the thick grayness, the woman must have noticed his presence, for despite his best efforts Samuel was less than stealthy in his pursuit. But if she did see him, she paid him no mind. At one point, her gaze passed directly over him and he felt his feet rooted to the soggy ground. But she looked away without reproach and they both went on, and Samuel felt the slightest bit encouraged at not being rejected.

Samuel followed the woman all around the dreary meadow. When they had traversed the entire field from fence line to fence line, crisscrossing over each of the little wooden footbridges that spanned the river, the woman returned to each sleeping hall in turn. She studied the buildings in detail, tracing circles around their perimeters and tugging at the locked doors. Samuel watched from a distance, crouched behind the corner of the nearest hall. As she moved toward the third sleeping hall, he rose from his hiding place and glimpsed a swath of muddied white cloth and the flash of little brown heels as another colonist turned the corner at the opposite end of his building. He came out into the open meadow, glanced over his shoulder and saw another woman following a path roughly parallel to his own. They walked on together through the unrelenting mist, and Samuel soon realized they were both following the same woman.

They eyed each other across the meadow, glancing back and forth from the copper-eyed woman to one another, until they gradually shifted their attention away from their target. Though there was some coarse polish to her movements, this new female was but a child learning to walk in the shadow of its mother in comparison to the grace of the copper-eyed woman. Soon they lost sight of her in the veils of silver mist. They followed a rough estimate of her course for a few minutes more until their paths drew closer and closer and finally intersected. They stopped and faced each other. The rain pitter-pattered on the leaves of the tree next to them. This new woman seemed to be about Samuel’s age, perhaps a year or two older. Her eyes were large and black, rather empty and without any spark. But though they emitted no light, they appeared to draw the world into them, collecting all the rays of light reflected by the objects caught in her gaze.

Samuel spoke first. “Hello.”

The woman’s big eyes grew even wider and she seemed to fade away from him, although in actuality she did not step back one centimeter.

She frowned furiously. “Hellohoweryou?”

“Goodtha—” Samuel began to reply and then stopped.
That was not right
. He tried to speak again, but his tongue and lips felt heavy and sluggish. “How… how are… you?” he managed.

Her face drained of emotion. “Goodthankshoweryou?” she said.

Now Samuel took a slow step backward. The woman opened her mouth but no words came out. She jerked a hand up mechanically, as if to grab his arm, and then just as quickly returned it to her side.

“Fine,” Samuel answered, as he took another step back. He skidded in the wet grass and looked down to catch his footing. Slick, brown mud bled amidst the sodden and broken turf. The woman started toward him, then hesitated and slowly retreated. She turned and scurried away. Samuel watched her flee across the meadow until the sheets of rain erased her fading figure. His waterlogged tunic clung fast to his skin and weighed heavily on his arms. He turned in the opposite direction and walked to the nearest meal hall.

* * *

The
copper-eyed woman returned to Samuel’s meal hall late in the day. For about an hour the sun had been low enough in the sky to cut through the ashen shroud, but as it sunk lower the scarce light in the windows faded and died. The people ate their evening meal in dazed, perfunctory motions. Samuel ate and walked the hall while his clothes finished drying. Crumbs of food from the day’s previous meals dotted the floor and he brushed at them idly with his bare feet. He was still pacing when the woman entered. This time, he was sure her mouth was twisted into a private half-smirk, though this expression faded as she stepped inside and gazed around at the colonists seated against the walls. Samuel stopped in the middle of the hall, transfixed by her presence.

“Come,” she said from the doorway.

She turned and walked swiftly out the door into the rain. Samuel looked to see if the others would follow, but they all remained in place and avoided his eyes. He gave his tunic one final wring and started for the door, driven as much by his desire to pursue this woman as by a sudden distaste for the other colonists seated around him. Their eyes bored into his back as he exited the hall.

The woman was already well across the meadow, and he quickened his pace so as not to lose sight of her. She walked to the nearest sleeping hall and turned back and stared at Samuel through the distance between them, a gray shadow against the hazy backdrop of the hall. Then she rounded the corner of the building and was lost from sight. Samuel followed her to the hall. The door was open. He went inside, dried himself with the blankets from one bed and fell asleep in the bed next to it. He did not notice the second woman, the one with the large dark eyes, enter the hall about an hour later and curl up two beds over for the night.

He awoke the next morning from a dream of the copper-eyed woman. The first rays of sun peered through the high windows of the sleeping hall. The rain had stopped. The image of the copper-eyed woman remained fresh in his mind, and with it a single word seeped out of the deep folds of his subconsc
ious.
Hero
. The copper-eyed woman was a hero, and thereafter Samuel would remember her as “the First Hero.”