Our Dried Voices (12 page)

So with Penny’s help, Samuel herded the animals back into the cages in the small buildings behind the meal halls. Fortunately, each pen had a gate in the fence, so it proved only somewhat difficult to corral the creatures in the general vicinity of the nearest building and lead them one by one into the room and back to their cage. Several times throughout the long day, Samuel led an animal into the pen just as the dreadful mechanical symphony of motion began. And despite his urge to flee, Samuel forced himself to stay and watch each time, so that he would never forget the manner in which his own life was sustained. He skipped the midday meal, not having any appetite for that food. Penny did the same.

Yet by the time evening came, he felt hungry again. He could not bring himself to eat the colony’s prepared meal cakes, so he took a box of plants from one of the rooms, broke off the stalks and ate them. They felt odd in his mouth, but were not offensive, and they satisfied his hunger. He and Penny left the last few creatures in the meadow and passed out meals. Samuel worked with a detached numbness, breaking and recombining the cakes with dreamlike, automated motions. By the time the sun began to set over the colony, one herd remained. An hour later, in the moon-splashed darkness, the task was complete. A peaceful stillness returned to the colony, the ugliness of the day safely
confined once more to the seven little buildings spread out across the silver meadow.

XXI

S
everal days passed before Samuel was able to eat the meal cakes again, and a few meals more before he grew reaccustomed to their taste and texture. Eating now required a conscious effort on his part; he still felt a slight twinge in his stomach, deeper than nausea, whenever he bit into a meal cake, and he knew this sensation would never completely fade. He was glad of that, and each time he ate, he reminded himself that he was alive only because so many other living creatures had suffered and died, and that he must somehow find a better way to survive.

Samuel and Penny continued to distribute meal cakes at each of the three meals and sleep the rest of the day. At night they patrolled the colony, but there was no more excitement. They did it because the colony was peaceful and cool, and because it had become routine. The faint stabs of starlight and the wan thumbnail of the new moon provided scant illumination, but by now Samuel and Penny knew each rise and fall of the meadow to their cores. They could walk as comfortably in utter darkness as in daylight. It was easy to get lost in this blindness, their muscle memory bearing them safely forward into black space, into soft gusts of wind and the tranquil silence of the womb.

Almost a week after the appearance of the bizarre four-legged creatures, Samuel awoke from his afternoon slumber well before the bells sounded for the evening meal. Though he had walked the colony the whole of the previous night, he was not tired. His energy had returned. He dug the eight scraps of paper from his pocket and spread them out on the floor next to his bed. He saw at once that five of the images could be matched up with one another to give two complete rectangles.

Doing so left three scraps of paper he still could not connect with any of the others.

The pictures remained on Samuel’s mind throughout the rest of the day and into the night. Penny spoke to him occasionally as they walked through the colony, but her words slipped around his other thoughts, his mind fixated on the pictures. If he could unlock their meaning, he could get to the bottom of the attacks. Samuel could scarcely see the images held in his hands, but at this point he could not forget them. He could almost feel the contours of the lines, waxy smooth on the rough fibers of the paper. But their significance remained a mystery. There seemed little for him to do but wait—wait for either a new scrap of paper to complete one or more of the drawings, or for a new challenge that would give him something to do, something new to learn, and hopefully bring him one step closer to the enemies of the colony.

Another night passed without incident. Sam
uel and Penny distributed food at the morning meal and retired to the nearest sleeping hall. Samuel awoke shortly before midday. He yawned and stretched and sat up in his bed. A scrap of paper fluttered to the floor as he stirred. Someone must have placed it atop his blankets as he slept, but the hall was empty, save for Penny curled up on her side in the next bed, the gentle curve of her back swelling out the sheets with each long breath. The paper bore a strange symbol, and its torn edges fit with another picture to make a third complete rectangular drawing. Yet Samuel could make no sense of it.

The day wore on without further event. Samuel served the food at the midday and evening meals with a faint tug of anticipation in the back of his thoughts. He caught himself almost longing for a new attack, for any break in the humdrum rhythm of the past few days. That night, the weather in the colony began to change. Around midnight, a noticeable chill arose in the air. Clouds rolled in and covered the night sky, blocking out the sliver of the moon and obscuring the last traces of light. It seemed there would be unexpected rain the next day. But the weather stayed dry and the air grew even colder as the night wore on. A few hours before dawn, Penny and Samuel wrapped themselves in some bedding from one of the sleeping halls. Little silver crystals covered the grass, stung their toes and crunched underfoot as they walked. By the time the sun rose behind the gray clouds, it had become so cold they were forced to take refuge inside one of the sleeping halls.

The other colonists began to stir around this time. The earliest risers opened the door and immediately rushed back inside, driven by the frigid air. As the entire hall awoke, a frightened whisper spread throughout the room. The clouds grew darker, even as the sun rose out of the horizon, but still it did not rain. The wind picked up outside and whistled through the cracks in the windows and shook the door on its hinges. Then, just as the colony’s bells sounded for the morning meal, a soft trickle of white powder began to fall from the sky. No one dared venture outside for a meal. They sat, swaddled in their beds, and watched this strange phenomenon with gaping eyes and trembling fingers.

After about fifteen minutes, Samuel went to the door and opened it slightly. An icy wind rushed into the hall and sent most of the colonists diving all the way under their covers. Samuel peered outside. A thin layer of the strange white powder covered the meadow, and more of it continued to fall from the dark clouds above. He reached down and scooped a handful of the unknown residue off the ground. It stung his palm with cold. Upon closer inspection he noticed the material was not powder at all, but many fine, white crystals. He held this odd substance until his hand began to burn from the cold, then brushed it away. His palm was wet. He withdrew inside and shut the door. Samuel looked at Penny, sitting up in her bed, wrapped in her blankets. She stared back at him. He did not know what to do.

XXII

T
hey waited inside the hall for the rest of the morning. The white powder continued to fall from the sky with no sign of letting up. In fact, it seemed to grow even heavier as the day wore on. When Samuel looked outside a few hours later, a thick, white blanket covered the entire meadow. By the time the bells sounded for the midday meal, his stomach had twisted itself into empty knots, and given the sporadic moans from around the hall, Samuel guessed many other colonists shared his discomfort.

“What do we do?” Penny asked from the next bed.

“We have to go to the meal halls,” Samuel said. “We have to eat.”

Penny nodded and cinched her bedding firmly around her. Samuel rose from his bed, his blanket draped over his shoulders like a cape.

“Listen,” he began. All eyes turned toward him as a murmur rippled across the great hall. “Listen to me,” he repeated.

He had barely raised his voice at all, but he might as well have bellowed at the top of his lungs. The hall fell silent at once.

“There is a problem,” he went on. “There is a problem with the weather. It is cold outside. It is cold in the air and on the ground. But we must eat. We must go to the nearest meal hall. Bring your blankets with you. Take extra clothing off the wall. We may not come back for some time. But we must go now. Do you understand? We must go to the meal hall now.”

The colonists exchanged blank glances with one another. Samuel was not sure they had understood him. Penny alone climbed out of her bed and followed Samuel to the wall opposite the door. They each removed an extra tunic from one of the poles on the wall, slipped it on over their other one and rewrapped themselves in their blankets. The other colonists stared at them for a moment without moving. Then, one by one, they stood and shuffled to the wall to retrieve additional clothing. Samuel moved to the door, and they followed slowly behind him.

“The meal hall is close,” he said. “Follow me. We will go quickly.”

Penny stood beside him.

“Stay at the back,” he told her. “Help anyone who falls behind. I will come back after I get the first ones inside.”

“Okay,” she said. He opened the door.

The wind felt even colder than before. It struck Samuel full in the face and rocked him back on his heels. The colonists behind him screamed. But Samuel withstood the blow and leapt through the door. His feet sank into the soft powder that covered the ground, but he drove his knees upward and ripped his feet from the cold white drifts and began to run. The other colonists followed as best they could, tripping and falling and emerging from snow banks half-covered in the fine powder. Samuel relaxed his pace and allowed the fastest colonists to catch up. He led these few to the nearest meal hall, dragged open the door against the opposing gust of wind and went back to help the rest.

It took Samuel and Penny thirty long minutes to lead the other colonists over a distance that would have normally taken three. They helped as best they could, but there was only so much they could do. The wind swirled all around them and bit at their exposed faces and hands. The tiny crystals fell in sheets, making it nearly impossible to see and burning their feet with cold until they went numb. Finally they got all the colonists into the hall. Their blankets and bodies were freezing cold and soaking wet. But there was nothing to be done about that.

The colonists lined up against the wall to receive their meal cakes, quivering and leaning into the hard stone surface like orphaned kittens nursing on a plastic bottle. Fortunately, Samuel had installed a food box in this hall, so there were no squabbles about the sizes of the cakes. Their hands still trembled and their teeth chattered as they held their food to their mouths. Samuel and Penny ate side by side.

“Thank you for your help,” he said to her.

“You’re welcome.” She pulled her drenched blanket closer around her. “What do we do now?”

Samuel shook his head and looked away. He was asking himself the very same question.

* * *

The snowfall did not let up as the day wore on. The colonists in Samuel’s meal hall cowered against the walls and shivered in their wet bedding. Samuel knew he faced a problem unlike anything he had dealt with before. In all the previous instances, the obstacle was immediate and easily located. When the doors to the sleeping halls were locked, he investigated the doors. When the bridges were broken, he went to the river to fix them. But how could he fix a problem in the sky?

And yet he could not even consider that question at the present moment, not whe
n he knew there were four other sleeping halls filled with hungry colonists too immobilized by fear and cold to brave the blizzard and migrate to the nearest meal hall. He would have to lead them if they stood any hope of surviving this latest disaster. So Samuel spent the rest of the afternoon directing the flights of colonists from the four remaining sleeping halls across the frozen meadow to the nearest meal halls. Within a few minutes, his fingers and toes felt as though they were on fire. His face was numb. Soon he lost all feeling in his hands and feet as well. Each time he reached another hall it grew harder and harder to grasp the door handle and pull it open. It slipped from his deadened fingers and the manic wind slammed the door shut in his face. The blankets he had wrapped around his body were so soaked they became entirely useless. But by the end of the day, the job was done and Samuel was back in the meal hall where he had started, huddled next to Penny in the pool of water that leaked from his drenched bedding.

He did not sleep that night; the same thoughts tumbled feverishly through his mind as he shivered on the cold, hard floor. He could not see any way to begin to solve this problem, and he began to wonder if this new catastrophe was even the work of the colony’s attackers at all, since he could not imagine how any person could have caused such a thing to happen. When the sun rose again behind the cloud-darkened sky, Samuel was still half-awake. He had convinced himself he must try to find those people who had caused all the previous disasters in the colony. But he knew nothing about them. They were little more than phantoms, shadowy figures he had once seen lingering around a meal hall in the middle of the night. They had fled over the colony’s fence and across the wide meadow beyond and left only secret messages in their stead.

Samuel gathered these papers once more. He focused on the three complete rectangular drawings, composed of seven total fragments. He could identify each of the images individually, but doing so told him very little about what the pictures actually meant. Was each rectangle a separate message or did they all fit together? Were they arranged in some particular sequence, and if so, what was it? He sat there against the wall until the midday meal, wrapped in his still-damp blankets, the papers spread out in his lap. He distributed meal cakes in the three halls and returned to his position in the first hall, where he nibbled at his own cake and stared at the pictures. Penny came and sat next to him.

“I think I remember you,” she said.

Samuel shuffled through the pictures once more. “What?” he asked.

“I think I remem
ber you. When we were younger. Children. We used to play together.”

He r
acked his thoughts for any semblance of a memory. He could not recall ever noticing her before that rainy afternoon when they had followed the First Hero.

“We used to play in the river,” she continued. “Sometimes with others, sometimes just us. I would splash you with water.”

Samuel tried to conjure up an image of himself frolicking in the stream with a younger Penny. The false memory swirled together with countless days of play and sex and meals with an array of nondescript brown faces. How long ago had that been?

“You never splashed me too much,” Penny said. “You were too afraid of me. Or too kind. But if I gave you a big splash you would go away and climb a tree. You were always a good climber.”

Samuel nodded dumbly.

“You don’t remember.”

He shook his head, afraid to admit it.

“It is okay. We all look the same.”

“No,” he said, his voice thick in his throat. “I know you now.”

She flashed a half-smile and smoothed out the wrinkles of her drying tunic. Samuel continued to stare at her, as though her face would suddenly hook on to some hazy memory of the past. He rubbed the rough scraps of paper between his fingers.

“Can I see?” Penny asked, and leaned in for a closer look at the pictures.

Samuel let her take them. He gazed around the hall at the ragged collection of colonists bundled in wet blankets against the walls, still and expressionless, like human figures carved out of tree bark. They were nothing to him. Yet together they would all sit and eat and freeze in this great, empty hall, and he and Penny would freeze along with them. He forced up an image of her face attached to a smaller, younger girl splashing away in the stream. How could he not remember her?

“What is it?” Penny asked.

He did not seem to hear her. “Is this how it all ends?” he whispered, still staring out at the room.

“What?”

He awoke from his daze and turned toward her. “Nothing.”

She waited, searching his face.

“Is this all there is?” he said, louder now. “Don’t you ever wonder if there might be something else, something more…”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“This place. This life. Every day. It’s all the same. We wake up. We eat,
play in the meadow for a while, eat again…”

She reached out and touched his arm. Her hand was warm, but he felt a chill inside him that did not come from the weather outside. A brilliant light rose in his eyes and they grew brighter and brighter, like two tiny embers of a fire to warm the cold gray hall.

“What is it?” she asked, her voice breathless and choked.

“… Eat, play in the meadow, eat again, go to sleep…” He turned toward her and his eyes blazed as he looked in her direction, but not at her, through her, his gaze directed inward to his thoughts.

“Let me see those,” he said, and lifted the papers from her lap. He tossed aside the two torn scraps and stared at the three patchwork rectangles. He shifted them around on the floor. It was all there in the words and images racing through his mind. He sorted through this mass of fragmented thoughts as his hands darted over the scraps of paper and rearranged them on the floor. Then he sat back, the seven pictures laid out in front of him.

He stood up. Penny grabbed at his tunic.

“What is it?” she asked. Where are you going?”

He seemed not to notice her for a moment. Then he bent over and pointed to the triangular shapes on the second piece of paper.

“There.”

“What?”

“I’m going there. The mountains. I’m going to the mountains.”

“What? Why?” The frail edges of her voice quivered and cracked.

“That’s where they are.” He indicated the first rectangle. “The people with the big heads. The ones who think. The shadow people. They ran toward the mountains. Toward the mountains where the sun goes down. There’s a door there. That’s where they sleep. Where they live.”