Silo 49: Deep Dark (17 page)

That was explanation enough for Marina. She had seen them and she knew what a mess they were. She also knew that one Historian would not be enough to get through those archives. She had a sudden thought. “Then let me help you with it. You won’t have to tell anyone else any secrets or break any rules by letting shadows in. Maybe Piotr and Taylor can help too.”

Greta gave her a doubtful look and her glances toward the two men were equally doubtful. She asked Piotr, “What do you think?”

“I think we don’t have much in the way of choices. You can’t train a new Historian quickly and you can’t shut down the Memoriam to use the others. Piotr and I can look through files as well as the next person,” he answered but added, “probably.”

“
Same for me. I’ve already been down there so I know what I’m up against,” Marina added.

Greta considered their words for only the briefest of moments. She included them all when she answered, “Let’s tell the council and get started then.”

Telling her family had been the most difficult part of the whole process. Joseph didn’t even bother trying to pretend that he accepted her explanation for why she was staying in the Memoriam. He demanded to know what was going on and
finally put a hand over her pack so that she couldn’t continue packing and avoid his gaze. She sighed and dropped a stack of undershirts to their bed in resignation. Joseph let go of the pack and crossed his arms, waiting for whatever she might say.

She gave him a look, one that made it clear that she was not at all happy to be having this conversation
. She did understand his position. His wife was packing up and leaving on some pretext to go live more than twenty levels away for an undetermined period of time. She wouldn’t have accepted it either.

“I can’t tell you everything. Let’s just get that clear right now, okay?”

He nodded. It was just one sharp nod that spoke volumes.

She sighed again and said, “I found some objects during the reclamation that turned out to be really significant. You knew I found things that needed evaluation by someone with some knowledge, but it turned out to be a whole lot more than I thought.”

Joseph dropped his arms to the side, a sign that he wasn’t quite as ready for an argument as before.

“Well,
as it happens, extra people are needed to go through a bunch of other objects and records to try to place these items and I volunteered. Two other people are too,” she said, hoping that would be enough. It wasn’t.

“Hold on there. You’re trying to tell me that you’re packing up and leaving us so you can look through stuff that belongs to Historians? How is that more important than your job or your family?” he asked, incredulous.

“It depends on what you mean by important. I told you I can’t share everything!”

He narrowed his eyes at her but it wasn’t all anger she saw in them. It was also curiosity and confusion.

She took one quick step toward him and looked up at him. She ran her hands along his arms and then cupped his face in her hands. She said, “I have a chance to change what we know of history. I
want
to do this.”

His own hands came up and wrapped gently around her wrists
. He pulled her hands away from his face slowly and she let her arms come down. There was hurt on his face.

“We’ve never had secrets between us.
Never. Secrets never help anyone. I should know,” he said, referring to his job. “Is this really something you can’t tell me?”

She nodded. It hurt her to
do this to him. “You’ll understand. I promise you that. I gave my word not to tell.”

It was his turn to sigh then. He stepped back from her and picked up the stack of undershirts she had tossed to the bed. He ran a hand across them and then placed them with care inside her pack. It was a kind of acceptance and Marina was grateful for it.

*****

In the Memoriam archives, the four workers were busy and getting increasingly frustrated and exhausted. They took few breaks and none of them were getting enough sleep. Meals were rushed affairs they escaped from quickly since they couldn’t speak of their joint effort in the dining hall. The dimming was usually long past by the time they broke and sought out their beds.

Dust filled the air as they dragged through box after box and cabinet after cabinet. Marina sneezed regularly and Taylor’s eyes were perpetually watering and red. It didn’t help that Greta, in whose domain they were, kept correcting them or shoving gloves at them or chirping about Piotr licking the end of a finger before he turned pages. It had been a seven-day of solid work and they had next to nothing to show for it.

Marina slammed
shut a giant tome filled with numbers about farm produce during a time long past and undefinable. It earned her a sharp look from Greta, who squatted on the floor at the other end of their current row. She was organizing a box of loose papers into neat and very precise stacks in an array on the floor.

As she reached for the next book on the shelf, this one equally big and probably filled with yet more numbers for squash and beans and olives, she let out a loud sigh. She heard a faint, “I hear
ya!”, of agreement from Piotr a few rows away and gave a wry smile.

She called out, “There has got to be a better way.”

“You’ve said that a hundred times and for the hundredth time I’ll tell you there isn’t,” Greta said from the other end of the row. She didn’t even bother looking up. Instead she added another crinkled paper to one of her stacks with delicate precision.

They had made progress and Marina, despite her impatience, was proud of that. Greta had started their project by directing each of them to get a random sampling of what records or objects they found in the deep stacks and cabinets beyond the few well organized ones at the entrance. With that information, she put a label on the chalkboard at the end of each of the main rows. As they emptied the stacks and rows, the material was sorted and then put in th
ese newly labeled rows.

Deciding on when something happened was very difficult.
When one only identified time in generic ways, one had to look a lot harder to place things in time. For her, each year belonged in a cycle of fifty years. Each year had 365 days, plus the null day before the new year every fourth year.

Maybe if they didn’t cycle the years after the fiftieth year they wouldn’t have so much trouble.
She had been born in the 34
th
year and it was now the 24
th
year. It was only now that she realized how little sense such a system made. No matter where she looked or what kind of record she found, they all used this system. Except farm records.

Farm records seemed to be the most complete of all the types of records. Everything about them was recorded. From when things were planted to how many plants of each type reached maturity to how much was pr
oduced. Seed selection, cross pollination results and even pest activity was scrupulously recorded.

Often years were referenced in what Marina had come to call ‘Orchard Years’. The orchards were i
nterspersed throughout the dirt farms and many of the dirt farm entries started out a new section with a reference to the trees.

On one the heading might be ‘
30
th
Year of Oranges’ along with some location designation in one of the farms. It made sense in a way. The orange trees at that location would be there from year to year. From there the entire year for that whole dirt farm might be recorded. But when was the 30
th
year of the oranges?

When she had mentioned her
idea of Orchard Years to the others, Greta had perked up and said that might be a good place to find out how long they had been down the silo overall. She explained that if they could collate all the orchards and all their years over the successive generations of trees, then perhaps they could count backward until they reached a point in which all the orchards started at year one.

They had all been excited and galvanized into action by the thought but after the endless books and binders and an increasing certainty that they were missing almost as much material as they had, the work had descended back into drudgery. 
She had found a single year that seemed promising and that was in the first year of some other olives on some other level. The entry stated that the previous trees had endured through 65 years and that the new trees planted in their stead were twelve years old when they were decanted from their growing pots.

She had flipped forward in the book until she came to the next year and her heart sank a little. It started with the trees being designated as
in their thirteenth year. How old were the previous trees when they were planted? How old were the ones before them? Greta was dutifully tallying anything found by any of them in hopes of working it out anyway.

As she went through the book it was just as she thought it would be. Only there seemed to be an obsession with beets and corn in this
book as they passed through one Olive Year after another. As she flipped past a mind-numbing report on the amount of beet greens that could be harvested per beet before the size of the root was affected a name caught her eye. She returned to the page and located it again.

It was a burial record. It gave the specific area of the dirt farm and the date, though not the year. It was the name and the little blurb next to it that caught her eye. It was Graham Newton and the blurb said that the body was brought for planting by Mayor Wallis Short.
Graham and Wallis.

There were a lot of men named Graham and Wallis recorded in these books of the past. She had seen that herself. Most were call
ed something else along with it, needing three names to distinguish them from the myriad others. It was usually a Graham-Scott or Wallis-Peter or something like that. It was only in the last few generations that the council passed a resolution that no more children could be named Grace, Graham or Wallis because it had become too confusing.

But this was different. This Graham’s death was recorded with an age of sixty and his profession listed as ‘Head of IT, Level 34’. That and the
title of Mayor in front of the name Wallis sent a shiver of certainty up Marina’s spine. It was the delightful shiver of having found something combined with the strange feeling of having touched someone so much a part of the silo that he was almost superhuman.

When she went to call out to the others, her voice came out a tiny squeak so she cleared her throat and called, “Hey! Guys! I found something.
Something good!”

The tone in her voice must have spoken more eloquently than her words because Greta looked over her shoulder in Marina’s direction. She held up the book and the look on her face caused Greta to put down her stack of papers and rise from her knees. She scattered one of her precise stacks as she turned to make her way down the row towards Marina.

“What? What is it?” asked Greta.

“You’ll never believe i
t unless you look.” She handed it over carefully and reverently. Though she didn’t realize it, that care more than anything alerted Greta that there was something very special.

Taylor and Piotr came around the corner and into their row just as Gr
eta found the passage and gave a gasp of shock. Greta completely ignored the men and looked at Marina and asked, “Do you think it’s them?”

Marina shrugged but the grin on her face was huge and unmistakable. “I don’t know. You’re the expert. It sure looks like it to me, though.”

Piotr stepped around Marina, still cross-legged on the floor and asked, “For Silo’s sake, what is it?” He craned his neck to try to read over Greta’s shoulder but she was too tall and at the moment, completely absorbed in looking at the book.

“It’s a burial entry,” Marina said, a gleam in her eye. At
Piotr’s ‘so-what’ expression, the gleam became a teasing one and she said, “It’s for a Graham. A head of IT. Body brought in by the Mayor,
Wallis
.”

Marina was gratified to see
Piotr’s expression drop along with his lower jaw as his mouth fell open. His fingers plucked at the edge of the book to turn it a little and he asked, “
The
Graham and
the
Wallis?”

Greta had kept on examining the book and the entries around it while the others babbled but she looked up at them, apparently satisfied with what she found. The expectant look on the faces of her fellow searchers varied in intensity, with
Piotr’s looking almost angry with impatience, Marina’s a bit smug and Taylor’s tinged with confusion.  She turned the book toward the impatient Piotr and said, “I don’t know for sure if it is them.”

Marina burst out laughing as if she expected that answer but saw that Piotr had gone vaguely purple. He gritted his teeth and said, “You’ll never be sure. You could have a signed letter from him that specifically declares it and you would still find some reason not to be sure.” He stopped himself there, pursing his lips and clearly making an effort not to say anything really nasty.

The historian seemed to retreat a little into herself at his outburst. She didn’t step back or change expression or anything, but Marina sensed the retreat nonetheless. When she spoke, she sounded more distant. It was clear to Marina that Greta’s feelings were hurt. “You’re probably right. I’ve only spent my whole life training myself not to jump to conclusions so perhaps I’m a just a tad more cautious than you might like,” Greta said flatly.

Piotr deflated a little, clearly realizing his hastily spoken words had creat
ed a rift and were far ruder than he had probably intended. He handed the book off to Taylor and turned back to Greta before he said, “I apologize. That was really rude and uncalled for. I just got very excited and I’m not as…as…”

“Patient?”
Marina supplied from her spot on the floor.

Piotr nodded and confirmed, “That’s it exactly. I’m not as patient as you or as patient as I need to be. I’m very sorry.” He ended with a little inclination of his head toward Greta. Just the quickest dip of the head that might have gone missed by many but Marina recognized it for what it was. It was the assenting nod of a shadow being corrected by their caster. It was a humbl
e gesture.