Our Dried Voices (9 page)

XV

W
ithin a few days of this procedure, Samuel found he had little time for himself. At each meal he visited a different hall to demonstrate the sharing of meal cakes. Most colonists adapted to the process after one or two meals, but many others did not, and over the next few days the number of willing sharers decreased steadily. Samuel continued his demonstrations, though he knew all along he was fighting an impossible battle. There were too many meal halls, too many colonists, and he could not reach them all at every meal. Nor could he compel all the colonists who received large cakes to share their meals, and he knew any attempt to do so might result in violence on an even larger scale. Samuel also guessed the food machines were significantly more complicated than any of the problems he had encountered to this point. To repair them completely would require far more skill than he could muster. At best he hoped to somehow convert the large and small meal cakes back into cakes of equal size, though how he might do so remained a mystery as well.

Samuel began by examining the food holes in all seven meal halls. Each square-shaped hole had three walls of smooth, dull, black metal, and a floor that was also black, but made of a softer, rougher material than the other walls. This bottom surface was covered with a series of raised strips that spanned the width of the floor and ran back into the tunnel. At the front of the hole this material ended a few millimeters before the plane of the wall and curved downward into the space below the tunnel floor.

As Samuel exited the seventh meal hall, a cool breeze wafted in through the open door and there came a faint sound of something rustling in the wind. He followed the noise, and as he stooped toward the floor he saw a piece of paper caught in the seam that ran the length of the wall. He went to it and pulled it out, but the edge that had been caught in the seam was ripped away. It was another drawing.

He rotated the image in his hands, but could not make sense of it. He placed it in the pocket of his tunic to examine more closely later.

* * *

At the next meal, Samuel made sure he was first in line in order to continue his cake-sharing demonstration, though he knew its effectiveness had dwindled. When the red light above the hole flashed, Samuel stepped right up to the wall and peered into the hole. A clicking sound emanated from inside the tunnel, and then a shadowy form dropped from the ceiling of the hole and landed on the floor with a soft thud. Next came the familiar muted whirring as the raised strips on the base of the tunnel slid closer and closer to the front of the hole until they dipped downward just before the plane of the wall. And as this surface moved toward Samuel, so did the dark object that had fallen from the ceiling of the hole. In a second, the floor’s motion ceased, and a larger-than-average meal cake emerged into the light of the hall.

Samuel took his cake, impressed but not altogether surprised. The complexity of the food machine was remarkable, but he was also struck by the relative simplicity of the whole process. He could not imagine the thing being done another way—the clean, elegant procedure seemed absolutely logical. The click-thud-whir of the next meal cake reminded him of his sharing demonstration, and he quickly tore off a piece of his meal cake and passed it to the next colonist in line. He spent the rest of the meal doling out bits of his cake while he tried to envision some modification of the machine that would make the sharing automatic. A dozen colonists still remained in line when he realized he had given away his entire cake, and he gratefully slipped away to the meadow.

By the midday meal the next day, Samuel had devised what seemed a satisfactory solution. If he could not convince the colonists to share their meal cakes with one another, he would have to force them to do so by gaining access to their cakes before they did. He envisioned some sort of container that would cover the food machine hole and collect each meal cake as the colonists tried to receive them. Samuel could then open the vessel and redistribute the cakes to give each person an equal-sized meal.

The following morning, he removed a few more cross poles from the fence that caged the colony, laid the poles out on the grass and began the painstaking work of cutting them into roughly equal planks with the broken window latch. He worked all throughout the morning, so absorbed in his task that he was startled some hours later by the sound of the midday bells. Recalling his commitment to the sharing demonstration, he raced across the colony to the nearest meal hall and rushed to the front of the line, eliciting angry shrieks from those colonists already waiting there. He took his meal, broke off a piece for the first colonist who received a smaller cake, and then hurried back to the fence line to continue his work, eating as he went. He knew the effect of his demonstrations was waning, especially since he no longer planned to linger in the meal hall to ensure the other colonists followed his example. All he hoped to do now was hold on until his final plan was complete.

Though he scarcely had a moment of rest during the day, Samuel found he enjoyed his work immensely. He had discovered something he loved, out here on the edge of the colony, hacking away at the thick fence poles with the worn-down window latch as the stolid mountains watched him from a distance. He did not notice this passion while he worked. His mind was busy and free. But when he looked back at the end of each day he realized every pole he pulled down, every swing of his arm that sunk the broken latch into the wood, every freshly cut plank, each of those small actions, and all the days, hours and minutes which they comprised were more precious to him than anything he had undertaken thus far.

Within a few days, Samuel had cut all the planks he needed. But he knew only one method to join together pieces of wood. There seemed no way around it. He would have to dismantle one bridge for its nails. The colonists would survive with just one bridge. There were some who might not last without adequate food, not to mention the increasing threat of greater violence that hung over the colony. So Samuel returned to one of the two remaining bridges and began to pry out the nails. The work took him two days. Head down over the bridges, he felt the sun crest and smolder against the skin of his back through the thin tunic. He had only recently driven the nails deep into the stout wood and he struggled to worm them out with the broken latch. And the strength he felt when he built the bridges seemed to be lacking now. He was destroying the first thing he had ever created. The bridge was, at best, a rough approximation of the original construction, yet it served its purpose nonetheless. And this bridge was his. He had never felt such a sense of ownership before. So when he had pried out the last nail and the broken wooden skeleton sagged into the river, something inside Samuel sank down with it. He waded into the water and gathered the loose pieces of wood and placed them on the shore next to the anchor posts, vowing to himself to one day restore them to their rightful place. With the nails in the pocket of his tunic, he returned to the more pressing task ahead.

For the first time, Samuel realized the burden of the job in front of him, the time and devotion it would take, not only the actual construction of the containers, but the hours spent in the meal halls every day as he waited for all the colonists to step forward and take their meals. In his mind, he saw that little red light blink hundreds upon hundreds of times, imagined himself as he stood over the containers at the end of it all, broke up the meal cakes and passed them out to so many pairs of greedy, grabbing hands. He could already feel the crush of all those beings surrounding him, the nausea welling up inside him and threatening to bring him to his knees. There was no end in sight.

He completed his first food box in time for the evening meal. He had cut and chiseled the fence posts as best he could, but the final product was still quite raw. Yet it had a flat bottom and a properly oriented hole cut into one side. He had designed it to stand on the floor of a meal hall with its square hole overlapping that of the food dispenser. Two nails fashioned into hooks attached the container to the edge of the food machine hole and a wooden slide would convey the meal cakes that fell into the tunnel nearer to the hole. As the bells sounded, Samuel was already at the head of the line to receive his food. When a sizeable number of colonists had assembled behind him, he stepped forward, his knees pressed against the box. The red light on the wall flashed once. Samuel bent his ear toward the container, closed his eyes and listened with great anticipation. The usual noises emanated from inside the wall, followed by a short pause and then a muffled thud from the bottom of the box. He opened his eyes and stepped off to the side.

A low murmur went up among the first few colonists in line, those who had witnessed Samuel come away empty-handed. The adult male behind him gave Samuel a bemused frown. Samuel inclined his head toward the wall. The man looked at the box, then at Samuel. Very hesitantly, he stepped forward. Samuel listened for the thud from inside the box. The man waited for a moment, then turned to Samuel with his eyes drawn wide and lips pinched together. Samuel did his best to give the man a reassuring nod and gestured to a place next to him, and the man tiptoed forward to stand by his side.

One by one, the colonists filed to the wall, only to receive what Samuel hoped was a comforting smile instead of a meal cake. One by one, they stepped aside to stand in a second line behind Samuel. After every colonist had passed through the line, Samuel unhooked the box from the wall and set it on the floor. He reached into the hole and withdrew a large meal cake. Breaking off a piece the size of a normal cake, Samuel handed it to the adult male behind him. He reached into the box a second time, pulled out a smaller portion, and combined it with the remainder of the previous meal to produce a cake of roughly normal size. He handed this piece to the next colonist. And so it went.

The colonists adapted well to the sudden change in routine, perhaps because they were happy enough to receive their normal portion of food once more. Yet in their obvious eagerness they began to crowd closer and closer around Samuel. He fought to ignore their presence, forced himself not to look at their blank, dumb faces, their big, matte-black eyes, the myriad tiny hands outstretched before him, impatient to receive the food they unconsciously regarded as their natural right. He kept his eyes down and concentrated on apportioning the cakes correctly, glancing up just long enough to make sure each colonist who received a piece of food did not linger around for a second serving.

After about fifteen minutes, the whole process was complete. The hall was empty save for a few stragglers. Samuel held the remainder of the last cake in his hand, a portion that was perhaps just a bit smaller than normal. Satisfied with the success of his solution and relieved at last to be alone, Samuel dug into his meal with ravenous gusto. As he stooped down to drag the container back to the wall, he glimpsed something on the floor. It was another small scrap of paper, torn diagonally with a set of pictures drawn on it in rough black outlines.

The next day, Samuel completed two more boxes. By the evening meal, he had installed them in two other meal halls. In the diffuse twilight of the hall he watched over one of these new containers and distributed equal-sized meal cakes to all the colonists in attendance. He went to the other two meal halls where he had placed boxes and passed out cakes there as well. There were fewer colonists in the second meal hall and even less in the third. Samuel suspected most of them had given up and left the halls after waiting in vain for their food. But many colonists stayed and gladly received their normal-sized cakes. His plan had worked. Samuel wondered why he wasn’t more pleased.

XVI

S
amuel soon realized he could only distribute food at three different halls during one single meal time. In any given hall, it took twenty minutes for each of the colonists to pass through the line and have their meal cakes dumped into the box, a process Samuel forced himself to witness in the first hall on his rounds to ensure everything went smoothly. It took another ten minutes to remove the box from the wall, break up the meal cakes and pass them out to all the colonists in attendance. Within two days, Samuel grew to dread those hours spent in the meal halls, the endless routine of breaking up cakes and passing them into a sea of eager hands. His sprint from one building to the next became more than a rush to finish his work or a flight from his bondage in the previous hall. It was a glorification of that brief moment when all there was in the world was the green grass and the cool breeze rushing past his face and his arms and legs pumping as fast as they would go. He ran until his chest and legs burned fiery and clean like molten steel. At times he almost laughed out loud.

Every so often Penny followed him on his rounds, and to Samuel’s surprise, she adapted easily to the routine of breaking the cakes into appropriate sizes. They worked shoulder to shoulder, alternately crouching to the box to grab a meal cake and standing to pass the proper portion into the next hand. Her presence at his side made the task more bearable, but whenever he spoke to her after their chore was complete, he was met with the same glassy stare, saccharine smile and doting affection. Samuel could never understand how the synchronized dexterity they shared while bent over a meal cake box could be so swiftly replaced by futile attempts at further interaction. It was in these moments that he felt most alone. Every time she seemed to understand him, to be like him, something in her manner revealed that she did not, that she was not, that in many ways she was so much like them, and again the nausea would rise in him, try as he might to force it down.

Outside the meal halls, Samuel segregated himself even more from the rest of the colony. On the night he installed his food boxes in the three meal halls, he stripped the sheets and pillow off a bed in one of the sleeping halls and carried them out to the very edge of the colony where he had removed some of the poles from the fence. He could sleep there in peace, without the constant cloying presence of the other colonists. None of them ventured out that far, save for the occasional visit from Penny. His days were dominated by long periods of utter seclusion, punctuated by masses of colonists swarming around him at each mealtime. When he was alone, the broken bridges and inefficiencies of his meal box solution lingered in his mind. But Samuel began to sense the answer to everything lay in the four scraps of paper with their mysterious pictures.

He had tried several times to match the torn edges of any two scraps, but none of them aligned properly. They must have been ripped from different drawings altogether. And if that were the case, Samuel doubted whether he could make any sense of these pictures individually, if there was even anything to make sense of in the first place. So what if he had found a picture of a bed? What could such a picture possibly mean? And why might someone intend it to mean anything at all?

During his first night at the fence line, Samuel awoke from a frenzied dream. He had imagined himself in one of the meal halls, taking down a full box of meal cakes to distribute to a seemingly infinite horde of colonists. The process began with the same tedious repetition. Stoop down, grab a cake from the box, break it to the right size and pass it into a waiting hand. Stoop, grab, break, pass, stoop, grab, break, pass, over and over and over again. He saw the hands and arms close in around him and block out the light, as the limbs of this human forest grew into an impenetrable thicket, the branches brushing against his face, catching on his tunic. They were everywhere, no bodies, no faces, just little brown hands and arms all around him. He tried to work faster, to feed these insatiable limbs as quickly as they appeared, but for every hand that accepted a meal cake, two more seemed to spring up in its place.

Soon he could scarcely move at all. The hot acid churned in his stomach and stung the back of his throat. They began to grab at him now, these innumerable hands, at his tunic, his legs, arms, hands, face, grabbing and grabbing, mindless, bodiless hands, driven only by an incredible sense of wanting. Samuel began to struggle, but it was like fighting a mountain of fluffed pillows. The limbs wound themselves around him. Every blow he delivered was met not by solid flesh but by some insipid softness that absorbed the force and sucked him deeper into its hold. He tried to yell, and the hands pushed their way into his mouth. He tried to bite them, but it was like biting into thick, sticky mud. The hands gave way and then returned to clutch at his tongue, teeth, tonsils. They reached under his tunic, through the arm and neck holes, pushed into his nose and ears. He shut his eyes to keep fingers from poking into them. The arms encircled his throat, the little hands squeezed and he began to choke. Tiny stars flashed on the insides of his eyelids, then blurred and faded into darkness.

He awoke in the dark meadow, lying in the grass next to the partially disassembled fence, the blanket and sheets coiled around his body. He continued to thrash about for a few seconds until he opened his eyes and realized where he was. He stopped struggling and began to disentangle himself from the web of bedding. Then he sat bolt upright, ripped the sheets from his body and gathered them together in his arms. He sprinted across the meadow to the river, threw down the bundle of sheets at the foot of the bridge he had repaired and then destroyed, and tore them into long, thin strips as his hands quivered with joy. He knew how to fix the bridges.

When he had reduced the sheets to a heap of cloth ribbons, he draped them over his shoulders and waded into the river. He started at the cracked center of the bridge and used the sheets to lash two planks of wood around each of the broken spanning beams. From there he moved outward and tied on the cross planks that made up the walkway. As dawn broke over the colony, Samuel secured the last plank in place. He waded back to the shore and walked tentatively across the bridge. The planks held. He raced back across, then returned to the middle, jumped up and down a few times, and vaulted into the river.

Yet Samuel’s joy was short-lived. He knew daybreak forewarned the sound of the meal bells and the resumption of his burden. He sat on the river bank and allowed the first rays of sun to dry him. But he hardly needed to rest; he did not feel tired at all. A great flood of energy coursed through his veins, and it took all his self-control to sit still and bask in the day’s first light and wait to resume his work on the bridges once more. When the bells sounded, he sprinted to the nearest meal hall, rushed through his chore and then hurried through the other two halls. As he withdrew the last meal cake from the box in the third hall, he pulled with it a rough scrap of paper.

By now only a few cakes remained and Samuel was anxious to finish his task. He pocketed the drawing, passed out the remaining cakes and ducked out of the hall, far too eager to finish the bridges to consider the particular significance of this latest enigma.

He went to the nearest sleeping hall, stripped three beds of their sheets and blankets and returned to the fence to remove more poles. He realized he could work more efficiently if he cut the wood into manageable planks at the fence and then wrapped them in a bedsheet and dragged the whole bundle behind him to the river. By the midday meal, he had cut and hauled enough wood to repair two more bridges. Again he raced through his mealtime duties and flew back to the river.

Samuel completed the first bridge by mid-afternoon, rested for a few moments and moved on to the second. About an hour into his work, as he was about to carry a load of spanning planks into the river, an older male approached Samuel’s bridge. Samuel watched him curiously. It had become rare of late for another colonist to so willingly venture into his presence. Yet the man paid him no mind. He settled to his knees at the river’s edge, leaned his head forward and cupped his hands to drink. He started to rise and a sour look passed over his face. The man’s mouth drooped open and his tongue extended twice in a forceful, undulating movement, as if trying to expel some wretched flavor. His brow furrowed and his eyes crossed. He was halfway between kneeling and standing when his knees buckled, his eyes rolled back in his head and he crumpled to the ground.

From his position a few meters away, Samuel saw quite clearly the look that passed over the colonist’s face as he fell: eyes wide, lips pressed together and turned down at the corners. Samuel froze as the man dropped to the ground, then crept along the river bank to where the colonist lay motionless on the grass, the same expression etched on his cold, stony face, and in that moment, Samuel knew exactly what was meant by one of the pictures.