Our Dried Voices (14 page)

He kept his eyes on the videos the whole time so as not to lose sight of the tiny figure that every fiber of him said must be Penny, tracing his hand along the circular console as he went. Then his hand slipped off the control panel and into thin air. He stopped. He had reached the opposite side of the room from where he had first entered. The console ended abruptly at this point and resumed once more a meter ahead, but in this gap there were no video screens, no lights, no buttons, switches or controls. The wall simply fell away into a dark tunnel leading out of the room. Samuel peered down the passage carved out of the bare rock and utterly devoid of light, then looked back at the video screens. Penny was gone. Summoning what little strength he had regained, he turned toward the tunnel and stepped inside.

XXIV

S
amuel saw the eyes almost before he heard the voice. They were nearly a golden hazel color rather than brown, so brilliantly did they shine in the darkness. Then came the voice. It was a man’s voice, deep and booming, and yet it held a strange quality of newness, of freshness.

“Welcome.”

Samuel emerged from the passage and the figure of the speaker materialized before him.

“Welcome… my student.”

He looked like any other colonist in the generalities only: the pale brown skin, hairless head, brownish eyes. But his figure was all lines, without any roundness. He was tall, perhaps ten centimeters taller than Samuel, and his face was slim with well-defined cheekbones running down to a narrow but strong chin, his lips thin and torn open now in a wry smirk. His arms hanging at his sides bore a sinewy tensile strength, as though composed of a multitude of taut cables. He was clothed, not in the eggshell-colored tunic common to the colonists, but in a pure white, loose-fitting shirt and pants fashioned from soft, lightweight fabric, and though these clothes hung comfortably from his lean figure, his supple, unyielding strength was still evident beneath this exterior. Yet his body was entirely relaxed. He stood comfortably, naturally, perfectly straight—it only seemed as though he were crouched and poised to explode with some sudden, brilliant, violent motion. One had the idea in looking at him of bullwhips hanging down from his shoulders and hips, or of stones fitted into the pouches of slings, waiting to be whirled and unleashed.

“For that is what you are: my student,” the speaker continued. “And I, I have been your teacher for these many days. My name is Leomedes.”

Samuel stepped forward, drawn by the resonant and magnetic quality of the man’s voice. As he did so, he looked up and beyond the speaker and came to a stunned stop in the middle of the great cave as his eyes passed over the dozen or more people behind Leomedes, among them faces he had once known, the faces of the colony’s heroes. Leomedes noticed the direction of Samuel’s gaze, and his grin intensified.

“Yes,” he said, sweeping his arm back to indicate the gallery. “I have been teachers to them all. One by one I brought them to me, one by one they joined me to bring the rest. And now I, we, have brought you as well.”

At these words, Samuel looked back at Leomedes, as if hearing him for the first time thus far.

“You did not really think you came here by chance?” Leomedes continued. “You did not really believe each of those incidents, those challenges you encountered over these past few weeks, were merely a series of attacks by some cruel and misguided opponent aimed only at tormenting you and the rest of those silly people? You did not really think those little scraps of paper, those clues which led you here, were simply left by accident? No, surely you were aware the whole time of the great order behind each of these actions and the sum of their parts, else you would not be here now.”

Leomedes paused to let his words sink in. Samuel stared at him, enthralled, and sensed rather than saw the space around them: the walls of the cave skillfully carved out of the black rock, the lights hung from the ceiling like those in the room with the strange creatures, the many passages cut into the walls that ran into the depths of the mountain, the small crowd of heroes arrayed behind Leomedes. Samuel realized they had been waiting for him for some time now.

“Yes,” Leomedes continued, “we have challenged and enlightened you each step of the way, each step developing your innate intellect, each step bringing you closer to us. Every act was driven by the single aim of developing your mind, the very gift that makes you human, so that you could rejoin a truly human society.

“For that is what separates us, what should separate us, from the rest of the animals: our minds. And that is what our race has so wantonly squandered since we came to this place. Do you know anything of the history of humankind, of our species?”

Samuel shook his head.

“Of course not. How could you? We did not always live in this place. Once, many hundreds of years ago, humans lived on a planet called Earth, a place far beyond the reaches of the stars. There were many more of our kind then, and they faced many more difficulties than we know today. Yet they also possessed a wealth of ingenuity, and by the power of their minds they contrived to solve every test placed before them. But after some time, Earth grew too small and too fragile for humans, and so some of them travelled across the sky to this planet. They called it Pearl back then. Yet by now they had solved all their problems and Pearl was still a very big place to them. They no longer had any use for their minds. Slowly but surely, they became like the people you know today. They neglected their minds, they willfully surrendered the greatest gift they possessed by virtue of being human, because thought became unnecessary for their survival; it became an excess—and a weighty one at that—an act considered too hard, too confusing, too burdensome to bear any longer.

“And so humans stopped thinking. It didn’t happen all at once of course. I wasn’t alive to see the beginnings. But I have heard it started soon after your colony was completed. Its creators designed everything to function perfectly without any further human input. Life suddenly became very easy. You woke up in a bed that was cleaned and remade for you each night, ate food that was prepared for you by mysterious machines, spent the day in a lush, green meadow where it rained just enough to keep the plants alive and thriving and no more. There was no need to think. And so little by little, one by one, people ceased to do so.

“Language came next. You have, I’m sure, become quite familiar with the regression of our language. Language is only a means for communicating what one is thinking, and without rational, coherent thought, language is useless. But that is what exists in your colony today: people reciting worn out, empty phrases from the last vestiges of anything that might be called a memory, or, like trained animals, repeating the last words spoken to them. And of course you have that story, passed down through the years from one Storyteller to the next, a desperate attempt to preserve the last traces of our language. But that too is useless. Few are intelligent enough to understand the story itself, and even those who retain some of the vocabulary are no better—for all the story teaches is words and not thoughts, empty words that are meaningless unless uttered with deliberate meaning.”

Samuel allowed his gaze to drift once more over the heroes arrayed behind Leomedes. The glinting copper eyes of the First Hero bored into his own and arrested his stare.

“But many years ago,” Leomedes continued, “there lived among the other colonists some people like ourselves, people who did not wish to see the great human race turn its back on the glory of its former days and while away the years as empty, foolish, squatting brutes. Those people left your colony and came to these mountains, where they began a new society whose sole goal was to recapture the former spirit of humanity through education and understanding. From time to time, they returned to the old colony in secret to seek out those who showed some promise of intelligence and attempt to convince them to join our civilization. But this work was very difficult. So long had humans neglected their minds that it proved hard to spot those who showed any potential for learning. And even those who were chosen could not always be convinced to leave their colony and join us here.

“For these reasons, our society has grown slowly throughout these many years. My great-grandmother and great-grandfather were among those who first abandoned your colony for this place. They thought they would see humanity flourish once more. But time stood against us, constantly cutting down the elders of our society. A year ago we were on the brink of extinction. We faced the very real possibility that the human race would go out with little more than a whimper, that those humans who carried on in our stead would play out the remainder of their worthless lives as empty-headed, glassy-eyed imbeciles who thought nothing, valued nothing and wished for nothing beyond the simplest and most immediately gratifying comforts.

“Around that time, those of us who remained decided to put a new plan into motion, the plan that has brought you here today, as well as several others before you, whom you may recall knowing. In the days before they came to Pearl, the greatest challenges spurred human beings to the loftiest intellectual heights. We decided to employ a similar principle in our effort to recruit the last of the intelligent humans. And so we removed the conveniences of your former colony people had so long taken for granted, conveniences that allowed them the treacherous luxury of avoiding thought. Each set of challenges was designed to identify one or more individuals in the colony capable of exercising his own mind. The challenges then progressed in difficulty and complexity until we felt confident that a particular individual had acquired sufficient knowledge and critical thought that he or she might be brought here to join us. That is the meaning of the incidents in the colony. That is the meaning of the little drawings you discovered. We designed all of it for the sole purpose of bringing you here and preserving the human race as an intelligent, thinking species. For we are the last vestiges of anything that might be considered humanity. But come. See for yourself.”

And with these words, Leomedes swept his arm back in the direction of the far wall, beyond the gallery of people arranged behind him, toward of one of the many tunnels that led out of the chamber and into the mountain. Samuel had never heard a person talk so long or so well. At times, he felt as though the words had just passed through him, that he had not really heard them or grasped their meaning. But he understood what Leomedes had said about the challenges. His arms and the top of his head tingled with a rush of emotion. Still, he was curious to know more. Leomedes moved toward the tunnel, and Samuel fell in beside him. The other people gathered in the chamber made to follow in their stead, but Leomedes called out “Fia,” and the woman that Samuel had known only as the First Hero came up to walk beside them.

They entered the tunnel, Samuel and Leomedes together in front, Fia just behind them and the others trailing behind her. The passage was wide enough for two people to pass comfortably side-by-side, and the floor was smooth and polished. Electric lights hung from the walls every twenty or so meters and provided just enough illumination for them to move safely through the tunnel.

“We found them almost as they are,” said Leomedes, inclining his head to indicate their surroundings. “Built by the first
people who
came to this place. We made them wider, smoothed out the floors, but these lights, that first room you entered, they were here long before my time.”

Samuel gazed around him, his mind too overwhelmed with unformed questions to pose a single one at that moment. They walked through the half-lit passage for several minutes. Numerous other tunnels intersected with their own, the darkened paths running off in all directions, and Samuel quailed at the thought of the enormity of this system of passageways that may have very well spanned the entire mountain.

But then the tunnel opened into daylight, and at first Samuel thought they had returned to his colony. They emerged from the mountain about ten meters above a lush valley dotted with trees, small plants and a pond. There were buildings too, albeit not the great halls of the colony, but modest, wooden buildings of various sizes. A herd of the strange brown creatures roamed within a pasture enclosed by a fence very much like the one bordering Samuel’s colony, although no such barrier surrounded the rest of this meadow. And as Samuel studied the scene before him, he realized that they must have emerged on the other side of the mountains, and that he was now overlooking a new meadow, a new colony.

“Welcome,” said Leomedes. “Welcome to our home.”

He and Fia waited as Samuel drank in the sight before them. The others moved around them and descended to the meadow by a set of stairs carved into the mountainside to their right.

“This is the second colony of Pearl,” Leomedes continued. “This is the place our ancestors built when they could no longer stomach life in your colony.”

“But how…” Samuel began.

“The same way everything is built,” said Leomedes. “The same way humans built everything they did throughout their existence: with their minds and their bodies and time.”

Together they stared out at the little colony strewn at their feet before Leomedes spoke again. “You are welcome to stay here tonight. Fia will take care of you. She will answer any questions you might have. I will be around if you need me, but I have some other business to attend to at the moment.”

He turned and walked toward the stairs.

“Thank you,” S
amue
l said, once Leomedes had set foot on the first step.

Leomedes looked back at Samuel over his shoulder.

“You are most welcome, Samuel,” he said, speaking Samuel’s name for the first time. “We are happy to have you here. There is an old story of a young man named Samuel who was called to do great things. I think the name suits you well.”

“Yes,” Samuel managed, his tongue thick in his mouth. “Yes, thank you.”

Leomedes bowed his head and pressed his thin lips together. Then he turned back to the steps and disappeared from sight. Fia put a hand on the small of Samuel’s back.

“Come,” she said, and Samuel followed her to the stairs, and together they descended into the meadow.

* * *

For the rest of the day, Fia guided Samuel around the colony. They began at the fenced-in pasture, where a great herd of the large brown creatures shuffled about, grazing idly on the grass or gulping water from wooden troughs affixed to the insides of the fence. These animals, which Fia called “cows,” were tended by several colonists who ensured the creatures were sufficiently nourished and treated any injuries or illnesses they might suffer. These handlers also directed the killing and butchering of the animals, a process Samuel asked Fia to let him witness. They watched as one of the handlers led a cow from its pen and into the long, low building nearby. A central aisle ran the length of the building, bounded on either side by several wooden stalls. The handler led the cow into one of these stalls and tied its neck loosely to a hook on the rear wall of the compartment. He then took the animal’s head in his hands and looked deep into its eyes. He whispered something to the cow, then pressed its forehead against his own.