Our Dried Voices (5 page)

VIII

S
amuel awoke late that afternoon from the best sleep of his life. He walked around the colony to each of the sleeping halls. Similar grooves had been cut into their walls, so he climbed into each hall and opened the doors. He emerged from the last building as the bells sounded to signal the evening meal. The setting sun at his back lit up the meal hall in front of him, dwarfed by the mountains surging upward in the distance. His stomach growled in response. He stopped at the river for a drink and watched the current roll by, a deep, strong blue flecked with sunlight.

A few colonists waited in line as he entered the meal hall, and they shrunk from his presence when he fell in line behind them. Samuel ignored them, marveling at the strangeness of the air around him. It was cool and light and seemed to resonate with a sort of energy as his limbs sliced through it. He studied his arms, wondering at this odd feeling. His hands and wrists ached already from his climbs up the sides of the sleeping halls. But he was not tired. He was already thinking of tomorrow. It had been some time since he had climbed one of the colony’s trees. His stomach rumbled again. He finally noticed the gap between himself and the young man ahead of him and stepped forward to close the line.

At his approach the other colonist scrambled forward and collided with an older man in front of him who had just received his meal cake. The older man whirled around with an inhuman yelp and threw his arms up defensively, striking the younger colonist across the face as he did so. The young man stepped back and felt dumbly at his swelling lip. His fingers came away with a few watery red drops. A choked growl escaped his throat. He started to lunge at the other man, but stopped in mid-motion and stumbled forward awkwardly. The older man scampered away, leaving his meal cake on the floor where he had dropped it.

The look on the older man’s face seared itself into Samuel’s mind. In that brief instant, the vapid mask of the colony had melted away, replaced by an animal expression contorted by rage and terror. The younger man swallowed and lowered his eyes and glanced quickly around the hall. A few colonists looked up at him from their meals, but no one said a word. He took his meal cake and scurried f
rom the hall, clutching the food to his chest.

A wave of nausea came over Samuel. Half in a daze, he stepped forward and took his meal cake from the hole in the wall. He carried it outside and walked away from the meal hall and across the meadow, finally taking refuge at the base of a tree atop a low hill. He picked at his food absentmindedly. From his perch here he could look out over most of the colony. He watched as the distant figures of his fellow colonists scuttled across the meadow like insects, occasionally drifting too close to one another, at which point they would both freeze for a moment—antennae extending, probing, gathering information for their simple minds—before darting away once more.

Yet despite the frenzied movements of these few, the colony as a whole was lifeless and silent. There was no wind and the meadow itself lay humid and sluggish in the tepid warmth that bled from the last of the day’s heat. The signs of the once peaceful life of the colony were gone. But Samuel had no desire for that past he too had once enjoyed. He tried to imagine sharing in the silly mindless play of the other colonists, tried to imagine making love to some anonymous female in the shade of a spreading tree. He felt nothing. The recent meal hall scene lingered deep in his mind, evoking a roiling nausea that left an acrid taste in his mouth and a dull throbbing in the space between his eyes.

After some time, which to Samuel might have been ten minutes or a hundred, Penny came and sat beside him.

“You… fixed them,” she said after a moment. She seemed pleased with the effort it required of her.

“Yes.” He could not decide if he was glad to see her. He gazed out at the meadow, plucked half-heartedly at the grass next to him and waited for her to continue.

“You are like them,” she said again.

Samuel looked at her now with his full attention. Her smile had a softness to it, a delicate uncertainty, like a worn baby’s blanket that has started to unravel at the edges and threatens at every soothing curl to return to so much cotton thread and empty space.

“You are like them,” she repeated, with some hesitation now. Her grin began to fade under Samuel’s stare.

“There will be more, more… problems,” he said. The low sun glared out of the cloudless sky and he was forced to shade his eyes.

“But you will fix them.” It seemed almost a question. Her lips trembled as she spoke.

Samuel did not know what to say, and in response to his silence her big, glossy eyes grew even wider. He could see in them a tiny echo of the same fear he had seen in the old man’s eyes, that blank look of mindless anxiety, a faded mirror reflecting the locked sleeping halls, missing meal cakes, incessant rain and the skittish movements and frightened gazes of the other colonists.

“I do not know,” he said. “I do not know what I can do.”

He looked away again, back out over the meadow. A painful burning sensation arose in the center of his rib cage. They sat there for some time, watching over the colony from a distance.

* * *

The next day the colonists awoke to find there was no furniture in the meal halls. This latest incident should have been a mere inconvenience, as the people of the colony often neglected the tables and chairs and carried their meal cakes from the halls to eat them outside. But as they entered the buildings for the morning meal, the colonists’ knees buckled slightly, their shoulders sagged just a bit lower. It was not a back-breaking straw, but merely a reminder of the weight upon them, a weight that showed no sign of relenting anytime soon.

IX

S
amuel saw the seams in the hall floor as soon as he entered for the morning meal. They were much more noticeable without all the tables and chairs disguising their presence. The seams formed large squares on the floor, and within each square was a cluster of small circular protrusions, as though the furniture had left footprints in its stead. A second set of seams ran the lengths of the two long walls of the hall, about half a meter above the floor. In the empty room these narrow grooves looked like doors in the floor and the walls, and as with the sleeping halls, Samuel’s first instinct was to find a way to open them.

Recalling the notches carved into the walls of the sleeping halls, Samuel scoured the meal hall for some clue as to how to proceed. But aside from the seams, the room was bare. There was nothing carved in the walls or the floor, nor any other obvious clue, no crumbs, no dust, no footprints, nothing at all. In fact, the floor was absolutely immaculate and even shimmered in the late morning sunlight peering into the hall. But Samuel did not notice this fact. He did not consider that the extreme cleanliness of the hall was especially odd given that a few colonists, despite their unease at the sight of the barren room, had ventured inside earlier that morning to fetch their meals from the hole in the far wall, and then exited through the hall’s only door, thus crossing the full length of the floor two times over as they did so.

Samuel inspected every centimeter of every seam in the hall, crouching by the walls, crawling along the floors. They were much narrower than the grooves carved in the walls of the sleeping halls, scarcely wide enough to admit his fingernails. When his search was exhausted, he sat back against a wall, closed his eyes and tried to think. For the first time in his life he felt the urge to lash out and strike something, anything, to smash through the floors and walls, break them off at those seams to reveal—what? A storeroom large enough to house an entire meal hall’s worth of tables and chairs? Even if the seams were doors, even if there were some way to open these doors, Samuel could not begin to imagine how opening them would somehow lead him to the discovery of the hall’s missing furniture.

Penny found him sitting in the meal hall some hours later, his eyes closed, head tilted back against the wall. He did not notice her until she stood over him and said, “Come.” He opened his eyes and his mind went blank; the tension dissipated. She turned and began to walk toward the door; he trailed her out into the meadow as if in a dream. The midday sun was hazy and distant overhead and the wind tickled his bare skin. He followed her with his mind empty, almost unwilling to think. She did not speak to him, and he was content to merely bask in her presence. He watched her as she moved, studied the way she walked. There was a relative fluidity to her gait, a studied calmness that perhaps belied some nervousness, the poise of a body held in constant relaxation by the mind, like an actress instructed to portray a sense of quiet ease. She looked up at him every now and then, and her black eyes lingered on his for the briefest of moments before her cheeks rouged and dimpled and she turned away once more.

They walked to the tarnished silver stream that wound through the middle of the colony and sat and dipped their feet into the cool, murmuring water. She leaned against him, her shoulder pressed tentatively against his, and he felt the still serenity of the meadow sweep over him. Samuel briefly recalled the previous day when he had watched the two men in the meal hall nearly come to blows, the fear he had seen in the older man’s face, and the muted reflection of that same fear in hers. But that thought seemed a distant memory, and though he felt a faint reminder of the nausea bubbling in his stomach, he suppressed it willfully now. He felt as though he could slip easily into sleep here on the cushioned grass, despite his seated position and the heat from the sun high in the sky. He thought of her smile now as he floated in and out of full consciousness, her lips a soft and slowly unraveling blanket. How easy it would be to crawl into a blanket such as that, to wrap himself in it, to roll over just once so the fraying cotton would caress him front and back, then to drift off into dreamless sleep…

The sound of bells emerged smoothly and yet unnaturally from the whisper of wind and water. Samuel and Penny watched idly as the other colonists began their half-hearted scurry toward the meal halls, drawn by their hunger, driven away by their fear.

Penny gestured to her mouth and asked, “Do you want eat?”

He decided he was hungry, and together they stood and began to stroll toward the nearest hall. He thought rather lazily that this was a different meal hall than the one in which he had spent the morning in concentrated thought, and he decided it was not so bad after all that there was no furniture in the halls, since they would now be encouraged to take their meals outside to eat in the shade of a spreading tree. Then, as they neared the hall, a current raced through his body as though he had just emerged, near-drowning, from a pool of icy water and inhaled a deep breath of fresh air. He left Penny behind and took off running toward the meal hall, racing to catch up with his thoughts, which cried out in a mixture of self-shamed disbelief and wild, joyous excitement, until he burst through the doorway of the hall and skidded to a stop inside.

The other halls! Why had he not thought before to investigate the other halls? Samuel fought to catch his breath as he stood at the entrance of another near-empty meal hall. The few colonists inside hung close to the walls and eased toward the door as he entered. Samuel ignored them. He went to the wall and inspected those seams, then turned his attention to the floor. Everything appeared to be identical to the first hall. His enthusiasm scarcely dampened, Samuel rushed to a third meal hall, then a fourth. They too were empty and clean. But in the fifth hall, he found what he had been looking for.

Against one wall, under a row of windows, lay a narrow piece of metal about the length of his hand. It was part of a window latch that had apparently snapped off and fallen to the floor. Yet the windows were about four meters above the ground, well beyond the reach of the people of the colony, and few colonists in recent memory had possessed either the desire or ingenuity to even attempt to open or close a window in any of the halls. Moreover, the latch showed no signs of rust or any other wear that might have led to its breaking. Yet there it lay, snapped off by some mysterious force, clearly broken rather than cut, as indicated by the rough edges of the metal. Samuel sat against the wall and weighed the latch in his hand, feeling the cool, smooth surface of the metal and the jagged, broken end. He ran a finger over the tip and realized it was sharp enough to slice his finger if he were to apply a bit more force.

The pressure of the broken latch on his finger triggered some connection in his mind, and he turned and crouched facing the wall. He ran the same finger along the seam in the wall, feeling its two edges under his skin, so close together they almost produced the same single sensation. But there was space between them, albeit only the very narrowest and shallowest of gaps, and at this moment Samuel made the distinction between emptiness and extension, nothing and something, zero and one. The broken latch was one thing, one entity, while the seam itself was not a thing, not an entity in and of itself, but an absence of entities, a gap in the wholeness, the oneness of the wall.

Furthermore, these states of oneness and nothingness were not fixed, but fluid. Space could be filled by bodies with extension, and such bodies could also be removed or broken to create empty space once more. In this way, the latch, which had once been part of a single intact window, was now separated from the window by a certain region of space. And the wall, which may have once been a single continuous panel, was now divided in two by the space of the seam that ran along its length. And perhaps most importantly, this space could be filled once more. Though he lacked the words to articulate this realization, Samuel nonetheless felt as though he had come to understand something of great significance. He studied the latch for a moment, then turned and pressed its pointed edge into the seam in the wall.

The latch fit snugly into the seam. Samuel wiggled it a bit, not entirely sure what he expected. He turned it over, reinserted it, wiggled it some more. Nothing happened. He stepped away from the wall, stared at the latch in his hand, then again at the seam. He turned and walked to one of the squares on the floor, crouched and inserted the latch into the seam and wormed it around. As he did so, he felt the latch catch in the floor with the broken end pointing toward the center of the square. The end of the latch seemed to have slipped underneath the floor itself, underneath a square panel bordered by the seam. He levered the handle of the latch downward and felt the edge of the panel nearest to him lift ever so slightly. Then, with a metallic clank from the opposite side of the square, it stopped. He pulled on the latch with all his might, but the panel, the edge nearest to Samuel a few millimeters above the plane of the floor, refused to move any farther. He relaxed his hold on the latch and felt the square sink back to the floor.

Samuel shifted the latch to make sure its grip on the underside of the panel was secure. He lifted the section again but once more it stopped in the same place. He lowered it, gathered all his strength and pushed the latch to the floor as hard as he could. Again the square rose a few millimeters, at which point there came a much louder clank from the side opposite Samuel and the panel threw the latch from the seam as it slammed back into the floor. Samuel picked up the latch, walked around to the adjacent side of the square and inserted the tool into this seam. He pulled on the latch, but despite all his efforts, the panel did not budge. He shifted it to a different position along the length of the seam and tried again. Nothing. Undeterred, Samuel walked to the third side of the square, the side opposite where he had started. He inserted the latch and pulled, and the edge of the section began to rise, a few millimeters, then a centimeter, then just high enough for him to slide his fingers into the gap. He heaved at the underside of the panel, but he could not lift it alone. It fell back to the floor, nearly crushing his fingers.

Samuel bolted from the hall and out into the meadow. He spotted Penny strolling across the empty field and raced up to her.

“I looked for you,” she said.

“Come with me,” said Samuel. He turned back to the meal hall and gestured for her to follow him.

She started after him, struggling to catch up. She found him inside the meal hall, crouched on the floor, using the window latch to hold up the edge of the panel.

“Come here,” he called. “Come and help me.”

She went to him and slid her fingers into the gap between the floor and the edge of the square as he showed her. Together, with all their combined strength, they managed to lift the edge. Bit by bit they raised the panel, and as they did so the entire square section of the floor began to rotate with repeated clicking noises about a fixed axis, so that as they lifted their side, the side opposite them sunk into the floor. And as the panel turned, there came from the depths of the newly exposed space beneath the floor the thick slopping sound of some liquid being agitated. Soon they had turned the section far enough to see what lay underneath. Bolted to the underside of the square, and now rotating toward them as they lifted this panel, was a table surrounded by chairs, one complete set of the meal hall’s furniture.