Author: Greg Hickey
Date: 2014-01-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Dystopia; Mystery; Fiction; Novels; Science Fiction Fantasy
Description: In 2153, cancer was cured. In 2189, AIDS. And in 2235, the last members of the human race traveled to a far distant planet called Pearl to begin the next chapter of humanity. Several hundred years after their arrival, the remainder of humanity lives in a utopian colony in which every want is satisfied automatically, and there is no need for human labor, struggle or thought. But when the machines that regulate the colony begin to malfunction, the colonists are faced with a test for the first time in their existence. With the lives of the colonists at stake, it is left to a young man named Samue
Publisher: Scribe Publishing Company

Our Dried Voices

Published by Scribe Publishing Company
Royal Oak, Michigan
www.scribe-publishing.com

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2015 by Greg Hickey

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

ISBN 978-1-940368-94-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014942255

Printed in the U.S.

To Jessica

Thank you. I haven’t stopped yet.

“I supposed that all the objects (presentations) that had ever entered into my mind when awake, had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately upon this I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, I think, therefore I am, was so certain and of such evidence that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the sceptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search.”

René Descartes, Discourse on the Method

Contents

Chronology

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

XIX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

From the Handwritten Manuscript “The Early History of the Pearl Colony”

About the Author

Chronology

2000: The average temperature on Earth reaches 5.3 °C, up from 4.5 °C in 1900. Earth’s seas rise an estimated 1-2 millimeters each year since 1900, compared to a rise of 0.1-0.2 millimeters per year between 1000 B.C.E. and 1900. Atmospheric carbon dioxide measures 380 parts per million (ppm), in comparison to 280 ppm prior to the 19th century.

2030-2040: The United States reduces its greenhouse gas emissions by over 15% of its total from the previous decade.

2036: Kwang Automotives of South Korea develops the first compressed air engine automobile having a range of over 2000 miles. 500 million are sold over the next four years.

2047: 45% of all carbon dioxide emitted by power plants is captured and stored underground.

2050: 85% of all cars in the world use some sort of non-petroleum fuel source.

2050: Global population reaches 10 billion people.

2050-2200: The equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane strikes Los Angeles, Miami, Mumbai, Sydney, Seoul and Tokyo at least once. 100,000 different species of plants and animals become extinct.

2054: Japanese engineers design and build a spaceship capable of transporting human beings to Mars.

2056: A Japanese manned mission to Mars is forced to return to Earth when the spaceship’s navigational system malfunctions one-third of the way into the journey.

2056: Polio is cured.

2061: A team of American, British and Japanese astronauts aboard Mars Odyssey III complete a three month journey and land on Mars. Private investors from the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Russia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Iran found Space Exploration for Sustained Human Life (SESHL, or Seashell).

2062: Saudi Arabian physicist Dr. Alim al Muwaffaq unlocks the secret to power generation via nuclear fusion.

2065: Saudi Arabia builds the world’s first fusion power plant. Ten more are built worldwide over the next two years, and 5,000 by 2078.

2087: Huntington’s disease is cured.

2089: British oncologists led by Dr. Thomas Greene develop a synthetic enzyme to treat cancer. Clinical trials on lung and breast cancer patients prove successful.

2092: Seashell scientists discover an Earth-like planet approximately sixteen light-years from Earth, which they later name Pearl.

2094: Muscular dystrophy is cured.

2096: Omega Laboratories purchases the rights to Dr. Greene’s patented enzyme and begins sale of the drug under the trade name Neoplastase.

2098: The Vesper VII, a petroleum-free, commercial airplane powered by compressed air and solar and hydrogen-based energy, flies across the Atlantic Ocean.

2100: Earth’s average temperature reaches 6.4 °C. Seas rise an additional 300 millimeters above their levels in the year 2000. Atmospheric carbon dioxide measures 620 ppm. Global population surpasses 13 billion.

2101: Seashell engineers modify the Bussard ramjet prototype to construct the Petrov ramjet-powered satellite Pearl I for an unmanned mission to Pearl.

2103: Seashell launches Pearl I on January 1, followed by a new satellite every five years until 2153.

2108: South African veterinary virologists led by Dr. Christian van de Saal discover bovine infectious anemia (BIA) while searching for a vaccine against equine infectious anemia (EIA, better known as “swamp fever”).

2108: A revamped Vesper airliner carries passengers from Los Angeles to Sydney.

2116: Osteoporosis is cured.

2128: Indian oncologists led by Dr. Ashakiran Avani discover a general vaccination, called “frondosavani,” that prevents mutation by carcinogenic agents.

2135: Japanese virologist Dr. Kameko Yamashita unearths Dr. van de Saal’s work, and discovers cattle infected with BIA develop immunity to bovine immunodeficiency virus (BIV).

2139-2147: World War III creates alliances of alpha, beta and gamma states drawn along religious and ideological lines.

2143: Cystic fibrosis is cured.

2146: The satellite Pearl II crashes on Pearl, but its video equipment is damaged and no images of the planet are available.

2147: 35% of all commercial airplanes are powered entirely by non-fossil fuels.

2147: Dr. Yamashita engineers the first clinically successful HIV vaccine based on her research on BIA and BIV.

2153: Cancer is cured.

2156: Japan reports zero incidences of AIDS. Near exterminations are reported in the United States and several European nations during the 2150s.

2157: Pearl IV orbits Pearl. Video indicates the planet seems capable of supporting human life.

2160: Ebola virus is cured.

2162: Tay-Sachs disease is cured.

2163: An AIDS outbreak occurs at a Munich hospital due to a mutation in the virus.

2170: Seashell launches the generation ship Pearl Voyager I carrying four astronauts and their spouses. Communication systems fail ten years into the journey and the ship is lost forever.

2178: Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease) is cured.

2181: Influenza is cured.

2183: Virologists around the world produce a series of vaccines that neutralize all known strains of HIV/AIDS.

2184: Seashell launches Pearl Voyager II.

2186: Multiple sclerosis is cured.

2189: HIV/AIDS is cured.

2189: Extreme weather patterns occur more frequently, exemplified by a rogue wildfire that decimates over 10% of Los Angeles.

2191: Seashell launches Pearl Voyager III.

2192: Alzheimer’s disease is cured.

2195: Diabetes mellitus is cured.

2196: The population of Africa reaches 6 billion people.

2198: Global population reaches 24 billion people.

2199: Pearl Voyager II returns to Earth after experiencing mechanical failures.

2200: Earth’s seas rise an additional 400 millimeters above their levels in the year 2100. During these hundred years, Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Mumbai, Jakarta, Dhaka and New Orleans are completely flooded. Earth’s average temperature reaches 7.6 °C. Frequent droughts plague sub-Saharan Africa, as well as Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Melbourne, Mexico City, São Paulo, Stockholm, Vienna and Moscow. Atmospheric carbon dioxide measures 1120 ppm.

2207: Acute viral nasopharyngitis (common cold) is cured.

2213: World War IV begins in central Africa. The alpha states (United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Germany, France, Russia, Mexico and Brazil) declare war on the beta states (Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, India, Malaysia and the Philippines), though all battles take place in Africa.

2224: Both the alpha and beta states declare victory and withdraw from Africa, ending World War IV. 289 million lives are lost in the war: 53 million alpha soldiers, 44 million beta soldiers and 192 million civilians, almost all of them African.

2225: Astronauts aboard Pearl Voyager III become the first humans to orbit Pearl. Fifty-six manned Voyager ships are sent to Pearl over the next two years to erect a colony.

2234: The first genetically enhanced, disease-resistant human child is born.

2235: Seashell completes construction of the Pearl Colonizer, a ramjet-powered generation ship capable of transporting thousands of people to Pearl, and launches it on December 31.

2252: An estimated one-fifth the total distance to Pearl, the Colonizer loses contact with Seashell headquarters on Earth.

2325: The Colonizer lands on Pearl.

I

The sound of the bells echoed across the colony. They sounded five times, and by the end of the fifth peal everyone had stopped what they were doing and started to walk toward the nearest source of the noise. The bells had a tinny, hollow sound to them. To be sure, it was unmistakably the sound of bells, but it lacked that rich, thunderous, rolling swell once heard in passing by an old church at the top of the hour. Instead, it was as though the sound of real bells had been recorded and re-recorded ad infinitum until only bell-like sounds now remained.

The bells called the people to the midday meal. All across the lush meadow, the colonists fell into a kind of reverie. Moments earlier, they had been romping through the meadow or splashing in the river with the joyful abandon of children, while others napped blissfully at the base of a modest hill or fornicated with some momentary lover in the shade of a spreading tree. But now their innocent laughter, their hushed excited voices, their intermittent shrieks of pleasure all ceased for an instant as they moved as one toward the sound of the bells. As soon as the fifth toll had faded in the air, the human noise resumed as though it had never been silenced. The colonists walked eagerly but unhurriedly, small, hairless, brown-skinned people, all barefooted and dressed in simple, cream-colored smocks.

The bell sounds came from the seven meal halls spread throughout the colony—long, tall, rectangular buildings erected from the black, craggy rock characteristic of the mountains of Pearl, now smoothed down and cut into bricks and painted a soothing off-white. Another smaller building abutted one end of each meal hall. Their wan stone façades matched those of the larger halls and there were no discernible entryways in their solid exteriors.

As the colonists entered each meal hall, they lined up along the right-hand wall to wait for their food. The walls were painted a pale sky blue, and on the far wall was a small square hole. One by one, each diner stepped forward in line, a small, red light above the hole flashed, a short clicking and whirring noise sounded and then a round, firm, dark brown cake appeared at the edge of the opening. One by one, each colonist took the proffered meal cake and carried it over to one of the many wooden tables or out into the meadow.

Near the front of the line at one hall, a male colonist turned to face the man behind him.

“Hellohoweryou?” said the first man.

“Goodthankshoweryou?” replied the second man.

“Goodthankshoweryou?”

“Goodthankshoweryou?”

The two men stared blankly at each other for a moment. Then the first man blinked and said “Goodweathertoday.”

The second bobbed his head and grinned. “Betterenyesterday.”

They continued to gaze at each other with vapid expressions until the first man turned around and stepped forward in line. The two men were right. It was Tuesday. It rained on Mondays. And thanks to the colony’s weather modification system, it had rained every Monday, and only on Monday, for hundreds of years.

* * *

When about half the colonists at this particular meal hall had received their food, an adult woman moved to the front of the line. A young boy, no taller than her waist, stood behind her. The woman stepped up to the wall, the red light above the hole flashed… and nothing happened. There was no clicking, no whirring, and no meal cake emerged from the hole in the milky blue wall. Some people a few places behind the first woman, by now so accustomed to the regular pace of the line, stepped forward in anticipation of her taking the food and continuing on. When the line did not move, they bumped awkwardly into the colonists in front of them, very much surprised that there should be a fleshy, breathing, human body in their path instead of empty space. Those closest to the front of the line fell silent when they saw the woman had not yet received her meal, and then the silence spread evenly and rhythmically down the line, like a row of pillowed dominoes falling to the floor. Yet all the colonists continued to wear the same insipid half-grin on their faces as they waited patiently for the food to be dispensed and the line to creep forward once more.

A long, loud, whining shriek from the young boy waiting with his mother at the front of the line broke through the stillness, and it was this sound, not the actual interruption of the food service, which seemed to have the greatest effect on those in the hall. The boy did not cry. He shed no tears, and the sound which emerged from his mouth was not a breathless and choked sobbing, or even the petulant howl of a child’s tantrum. It was a primal, animal moan that rose from the depths of his unfilled stomach, rushed up his throat with a cold and persistent ferocity and forced its way over his teeth, throwing his head back as it broke from his lips. No one tried to comfort the boy. His mother did not even turn around to look at him. Her weak smile faded, but she continued to stare at the dark hole in the wall, still waiting for her meal to appear. Then a child some dozen places back in the line picked up the boy’s howl, and then a woman farther behind did the same. Soon the entire line was wailing loudly.

Those colonists who had already received their meals hunkered over their cakes and stuffed their last bites into their mouths. One of them stood up, bumping hard into his table. The rest followed. They walked hurriedly to the door, brushing past the onlookers from outside who had gathered to see what all the noise was about. Those still in line stared dazedly at the others around them, at the now half-empty hall, an incipient question forming somewhere deep in their skulls.

A man in the middle of the line broke their unsteady ranks first. He ran, stumbling over tables and chairs bolted to the floor in his maddened dash toward the doorway. The rest of the line scattered in his wake. Out through the door they went, cracking bony limbs on the wooden furniture in their paths, pushing and trampling one another as they all tried to force their way through the doorway at once, like blood cells pumped through a clotted artery.

Those who had already finished their meals stood outside in a loose ring several meters away from the entrance of the food hall, and as the wild runners pushed their way through the door, they began to run as well, picking up the wail of the unfed as they went. They ran in no particular direction, a single mass exodus from the hall, teeming out across the gay green meadows, up and over the soft, undulating hills, and their cries rippled throughout the once-peaceful fields to fill the void left by the cessation of the bells with a sound far more vibrant than those stale chimes which had just called them to their uneaten meal.

II

Similar failures had occurred at three other meal halls in the colony, all during that same midday meal, and all with similar results. The food machine breakdowns in four halls left three functional meal halls in the colony; the colonists at those were scarcely aware anything had gone wrong. They either ignored or did not hear the cries of those who had gone without food, and they had no interest in the few garbled reports of the catastrophe after they finished their own meals.

But one young man in particular had experienced the food machine malfunction and remained unaffected by this incident. His name was Samuel—or rather that was the name given to him later on in his life, for the people of the colony no longer addressed one another by name. He was somewhere between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five (the close similarities in physical appearance made it difficult to guess the age of any person in the colony). Like the other colonists, Samuel was a brown-skinned, small, hairless person, certainly male, but otherwise mostly indistinguishable from the other adult males in the colony. Yet while the other colonists had identical brown-black eyes that appeared almost unseeing, Samuel’s eyes were deep and inviting, like a dark mountain lake on a hot summer night. And if another colonist were ever to gaze into Samuel’s eyes, way down deep beyond where those twin pools seemed to end, she would see a tiny spark of light, like the lamp of a lost diver searching for his way out of the depths.

Samuel was one of the fortunate few who had obtained his meal before the machine’s breakdown, and when the other colonists rushed from the hall in a mad panic, Samuel calmly walked outside and sat in the soft grass in the shade of the hall to finish eating. No one paid any attention to him, and like the others who had received their meals in the still-functional halls, Samuel took little note of the frenzy that engulfed more than half the colony that afternoon. He ate his meal cake alone and without haste, then stood up and went about his day.

Some hours later, as the sun kissed the tips of the distant mountains surrounding the colony, the hollow sound of bells called the people to the evening meal. A hush had settled over the meadow, leaving only traces of the gleeful laughter, the eager voices, the cries of pleasure that had rippled through the colony that morning. Again the colonists moved as one toward the meal halls. The last rays of the sun flickered over the soft white façades and the colonists averted their eyes. They drifted forward, each following the one in front of him. Most gave no thought as to which of the food halls they moved toward now. Many returned to the very halls they had been to for the previous meal, halls where they had witnessed the breakdown of the food machines. None of them had thought to ask about the machines at the other halls; in all likelihood, few of them could have even formulated this question or understood it had it been posed to them.

Samuel was one of the few colonists who did not return to the same hall where he had taken his midday meal. As the others trudged resignedly toward the seven halls, Samuel stood in the fading light of the meadow and waited. The low sun caught the tips of the colony’s few trees and dragged their shadows through the mossy grass. A solitary female sat atop a hill overlooking the rest of the meadow, her posture perfectly erect and relaxed as she surveyed the movements of the colonists below. Despite the distance, Samuel could tell immediately there was something about this woman that set her apart from everyone else in the colony, and he felt his gaze drawn to her by some gentle, inexplicable force.

Behind him, under the woman’s own watchful stare, lay two of the three halls whose food machines had not broken down at the midday meal. Soon the last of the colonists had entered one of these two buildings. A few minutes passed. The meadow lay calm. There was no wind and the long rays of the setting sun turned everything an unnatural golden color. Then a lone male staggered from the door to one of the halls. He hesitated in the darkening meadow, glanced about uncertainly as the remains of the day shriveled around him. He shuddered, once, though the air was warm as always. More colonists emerged from the hall empty-handed. The food machine had been broken. A stale breeze kicked up and the colonists shielded their eyes from this sudden assault. A few waited inside the meal hall. The rest milled about close to the entrance. When a considerable number of colonists had exited the building, the first man let out a single plaintive moan. The other colonists looked away and began to disperse.

Hearing this cry, Samuel turned to face the failed meal hall and watched the hungry colonists shuffle away into the dusky meadow, staring blankly at the grass a few meters in front of their feet. The wind died just as soon as it had begun, and now a faint chill did creep into the evening air. At the second meal hall nearby, all was still and quiet. Not a single colonist had exited the building. Samuel turned toward the hill behind him, but the woman was gone. He looked around and saw her gliding across the meadow toward the other hall. She seemed not to notice the now-considerable collection of people drifting out and away from first hall; she did not glance around at all, but kept her head fixed boldly on the second building ahead. Samuel stood and watched the woman for a moment, spellbound by her flowing gait, the tensile strength that coursed through her limbs and something more which he could not define, the thing that brought together these qualities of her body, that made them possible.

The woman entered the second meal hall and the spell was broken. Samuel came to his senses and scurried off in the direction of the second hall. By now, a few colonists were exiting the building, meal cakes in hand. Samuel entered to find more of them seated inside at the tables, jabbering gleefully to one another between mouthfuls of food. At the far end of the hall, the woman received her cake and turned in Samuel’s direction. Upon first glance she looked no different than any of the other adult females in the colony, distinguishable from the male colonists only by their slightly shorter stature and the soft curve of their breasts beneath their tunics. Yet there was something about this woman’s face, a certain tightness of her features that lent a fullness to their expression and distinguished her from the other people of Pearl.

She, on the other hand, paid no attention to Samuel, but just as they passed she happened to glance at him, and for the first time Samuel got a look at the woman’s eyes. They were hard and metallic, like copper, and when she turned toward Samuel they caught the fading sunlight and flashed fiercely. Samuel’s breath stuck in his throat and he felt a sudden hitch in his step, but the woman paid him no mind, looked away and continued on. Samuel turned to watch her go for a moment, striding through the doorway as though she were utterly alone in the world.

But then his stomach protested insistently and the moment was lost. He forgot the woman with the copper eyes, received his meal cake and ate it quickly at a table by himself.

* * *

At the morning meal the next day, the two remaining food machines broke down. By the afternoon of the third day, after the time for the midday meal had come and gone with no food received, the colony was approaching a sustained panic. It seemed hotter that day, the sun glaring down from high in the cloudless sky. The colonists skittered about to find shade or cool relief in the river. But there was no laughter, no squeals of pleasure or glee. One colonist would find solace under a rare tree; the others would dance nervously around his sanctuary. No one could say why the breakdown of the food machines should have had this effect. No one could say why colonists struggled to meet the eyes of those with whom they had so often shared a morning of carefree play. As the afternoon wore on, the surrounding mountains loomed large in the distance, great black rugged titans thrown up from the rich green meadow. The sun began to wane and the mountain shadows crept through the flowerless grass, bringing with them the impending hour of the evening meal.

Most colonists resorted to other means of finding food. Some ventured into the meal halls anyway. The rest roamed the meadows, tearing up and devouring handfuls of grass, biting into whole branches of shrubs or greedily gulping water from the river. The air around the people of the colony hung heavy and still, weighing on them as they bent their backs and stooped to the ground or crawled on all fours and grazed like maddened cattle. The quiet was broken only briefly by the moans of the hungry colonists, wild and wordless pleas that sprang unbidden from unfed lips and were lost again in the twilight.

Like the other colonists, Samuel survived. He pulled up some clumps of bitter grass and ate them a few blades at a time, drank from the faded blue water of the river and sat against the façade of a meal hall and waited. As darkness fell, he decided to retire early for the night. There seemed nothing better to do.

On normal evenings, the colonists finished their evening meals with a few hours of twilight and early darkness remaining for play, relaxation or casual lovemaking before they retired to the sleeping halls for the night. No bells called the colonists to bed, but for the most part they all began to enter the halls about two hours after sunset. There were five sleeping halls in the colony. From the outside they looked much the same as the meal halls: long, rectangular, off-white buildings fashioned from black mountain rock. A second, smaller building abutted the width of each sleeping hall; these contained twelve single-stall toilets, all designed to flush and clean themselves automatically. And like the meal halls, the sleeping hall interiors bore the same expansive ceilings, the same soothing blue walls, as though the watery skies of Pearl had been pasted directly onto these surfaces.

But beyond their anesthetizing appearances, the sleeping halls were little more than barracks. Rows of modest, wood-framed beds lined the single room, each bed freshly made up when the colonists entered for the night. The beds were bolted to the floor, and seams in the floor traced a rectangle around each bed. Ten metal poles extended outward from the wall opposite the door of the hall. A large rectangular seam on the wall surrounded each pole, on which hung several extra tunics like those worn by all the people of the colony. Though the fabric of this clothing rarely ever ripped or stained, the colonists did grow from infancy to adulthood, and as a person’s tunic became too small for him, he exchanged it for one of those hanging from these poles.

Almost all the colonists slept in the same sleeping hall night after night, just as they visited the same meal hall for each of their three meals, day after day. And though all the beds were exactly identical with nothing on or around them to designate an owner, most of the people slept in the exact same bed every night. A colonist who found another person asleep in her bed would stare at the intruder in frozen consternation until some sound or sudden movement woke her from her brief trance and she forgot all about the accidental incursion and wandered off to find another bed.

On the third day of the meal hall crisis, the first colonists began to trickle into the sleeping halls around the time the bells sounded for the nonexistent evening meal. At sunset several more had joined them. By the time night crept in, the sleeping halls were almost full, as though the colonists had suddenly developed a fear of the dark. Very few slept at first. Samuel found a bed in a corner of one hall but could not force his eyes shut. Other colonists wandered around the room or huddled against a wall. Every so often someone whimpered at the aching in his empty stomach. The hall had no lights, and soon only the scant glow of the rising moon staved off total invisibility. The colonists tiptoed to the beds, brushing against each other in the near darkness and recoiling at the touch of human contact.

When the sun rose the next morning, the colonists did not. They rolled over and pulled their blankets over their eyes to block out the offending glare. Most had lain hungry and restless throughout the night and there was little hope for sleep now as the morning stole upon them. But still they remained in bed, their eyes clenched shut. Perhaps they believed that by not opening their eyes they were still asleep and the day had not yet begun. And if they could keep the day from ever beginning, they would not have to face the prospect of another day without food.

But eventually they rose. Samuel shivered as he exited the sleeping hall. The sun was bright and there was no wind. He did not feel as hungry as he had the previous day, but did not think this strange. He ate some grass anyway and lay down at the base of a hill. The sun crawled higher in the sky and its rays prickled his skin and burnt his lips. He licked them—they felt dry and cracked but his mouth watered heavily. The grass beneath him was warm and soft and parted willingly under the weight of his heavy limbs.

The famine continued throughout the day. No one in the colony died of hunger—at the very least, the colonists had all retained their basic survival instincts, and those who were nearest to starvation managed to sustain themselves on grass and leaves and river water. Through half-lidded eyes Samuel saw the colony’s joyous players replaced by listless shells of human beings with pale faces and sunken eyes, the comfortable loungers by living corpses almost too weak to move. Across the meadow one colonist moaned. Half-chewed green blades spilled from his mouth. The others ignored him. They drifted over the sun-soaked meadow and waited for anything that would take away the feeling of life, a feeling which had become all too painful among the living.

* * *

On the morning of the fourth day the colony remained lifeless, the people staying in bed as long as possible. But had anyone been awake about an hour after sunrise, they would have seen a woman emerge from an opening in the wall of the low building attached to one of the meal halls. The woman rubbed her eyes as she stepped into the bright morning light and walked off in the direction of one of the sleeping halls. There she took a pillow from an empty bed, went back outside, and fell asleep in the building’s shadow. She met a few people as she entered the sleeping hall, those who could no longer bear the hard sun beating against their closed eyelids and had crept out into the meadow to wait for darkness. They did not recognize her. No one in the colony would have recognized this woman, for there was nothing particularly distinctive about her physical appearance. No one would have recognized her, save Samuel. For she was the woman with the bright copper eyes who had struck his attention a few days earlier.

When the bells sounded, a few colonists drifted into the meal halls, acting out of boredom or habit or the faintest ember of hope that the food machines might have been miraculously repaired. And in fact, when the first person stepped up to the hole in the back wall, the red light flashed and there was a familiar clicking and whirring sound. And then a plate of food appeared in the opening.

III

Within a few days it seemed nothing out of the ordinary had happened in the colony. Laughter returned to the meadow. The big cottony clouds that signaled the next day’s rain rolled in and blotted out the sun’s heat. All the food machines functioned regularly once more. Most colonists took their meals and ate outside, reveling in the idyllic weather. Samuel arrived late to the midday meal. He ate his cake and walked along the river that wound idly through the center of the colony, occasionally stopping to dip a toe into his shimmering reflection. Groups of colonists splashed about in the shallow water, their wordless, playful cries diluted by the drowsy babble of the stream. Others napped in the shadow of the halls or the few trees dotting the meadow. Samuel wiped crumbs from his hands and turned away from the river for a shady tree of his own.

A female colonist intercepted him, stepped into his path without a word and batted her eyelashes, her face blank save for an overwrought attempt at a fetching half-smile. Samuel would not have recognized her a second time. She moved a step closer to him as they converged at the edge of a low-hanging tree. Reached out, laid her hand on his inner thigh. He slipped a hand under her tunic. Pushed her into the shadows. There was the slight curve of her breast that marked her sex. Not that it mattered.

Under the tree it was stagnant, windless. The willowy boughs drooping from the gnarled and stunted trunk washed away the sounds of the meadow. Their brown skin rubbed and smeared. Their breaths commingled. Shallow. Rapid. Climbing. Their heat filled the emerald shade and cocooned around them. Mottled leaf-shadows wavered across their bodies until they shuddered and fell still. They shared one final breath together, their chests falling heavily.

They separated intact. Samuel picked up her tunic and pulled it over his head. Neither noticed. She donned his tunic over smooth skin that glistened with sweat and ran her hands down the front, ironing out invisible creases. It was just slightly loose on her.

She turned her moony face toward him and forced another grin. “Thuvyuvarymuch. Lunkyubye,” she said, repeating a variation of words Samuel had spoken many times before.

The branches swept closed behind her. Samuel ran his tongue around the inside of his dry mouth. He walked to the river and urinated into the current. Then he knelt and drank. The slow tide gurgled as it lapped over the bank. He swished some water around in his mouth, imitating its sound. He bent again and rinsed the sweat from his face. The stream slipped on immutable, bearing his heat away.

* * *

In the evening the air was cool and fine. The clouds darkened with the sunset and stained the land a faded silver. Tomorrow it would rain. Samuel had slept the rest of the afternoon under the smallest and last unoccupied tree in the meadow. He awoke before the sound of the evening bells and was the first to arrive at the nearest meal hall. He ate at a table by himself, before any other colonist could join him. Outside the sky coalesced from ink and milk to solid granite. Samuel strolled through the crisp breeze, content in the passage of another day.

The other colonists scampered through the meadow, oblivious to their recent brush with disaster. In the measured transition of sun to moonlight, the meal halls glowed faintly opalescent and the river sparkled as it meandered through the colony, under the simple wooden fence that enclosed their little plot of meadow and away toward the sleepy mountains in the distance. Beyond the fence, there was only gray and empty darkness, kilometers of untouched meadow all the way out to the shadowed peaks on every side. Samuel played a game with himself, picking out the faint jagged horizon between earth and rock, then closing and opening his eyes to find it again. Open. Close. Open. Close. The dim silver line winked at him from out of the gloom.

Night blackened the sky within a few moments, then broke into faint streaks of light behind the thick clouds. Lightning, distant and beautiful under a silk cloak. Samuel turned away from the mountains and fell in with the other colonists already on their way to the nearest sleeping hall. They chattered eagerly, giggled together, their voices tripping over one another like the days rolling over and onward. They crawled into soft, pillowed beds with fresh, starched sheets. Samuel fell asleep almost instantly. He did not dream. A night breeze whispered through the windows of the hall as the thunder lolled a faint lullaby.

IV

The next morning it rained in the colony, just as it had seven days ago, and seven days before that. And then the storms continued into the next day. On rainy days, the colonists typically took refuge in the sleeping halls, which remained open all day long. But when the first colonists raced across the sopping meadow after their morning meal on the second cloud-darkened day, they found the hall doors closed and locked. Two straight days of storms was unprecedented in the colony’s memory. Locked sleeping halls were unreal. By nightfall of the second day, the doors still did not open and the rain kept falling.

On the third morning, the vast majority of the colonists nestled damply in the seven meal halls around the colony. The soft drizzle continued on unabated. Fortunately, the food machines remained functional. The people of the colony may have forgotten the previous incident, but the same sense of foreboding returned to them now. They shrunk against the walls, their eyes downcast, most of them alone. No one moved. No one said a word. The stark furniture waited empty in the middle of the hall as the high windows wept in little gray rivulets.

Samuel sat on the floor in one of the halls and scanned the long celestial-blue room. He found himself expectant, almost curious, as though he was sitting down to hear the beginning of a long story. He had been one of the first to enter the halls the previous day after he had tried two of the sleeping halls and found their doors locked. Unlike most of the other colonists, who suffered their cold and damp conditions hopelessly curled up in the corners of the hall, Samuel paced the length of the room until his clothes and skin were dry. Despite the incessant rain, the temperature in the colony had not dropped, and it remained warm enough inside the hall to keep him comfortable.

The midday meal came and went. The colonists navigated the perimeter of the hall to retrieve their cakes and returned to their previous seats against the wall to eat in silence. Samuel ate and traced his foot against the edge of a seam in the floor surrounding the nearest set of table and chairs. He noticed that these strange lines drew a square around each set of furniture in the entire hall. He had just finished the last bite of his meal cake when the woman with the copper eyes entered the meal hall. She stalked up and down the length of the room, her soaked tunic dripping a trail on the floor as it dried. The other colonists watched her from lowered eyes as they crouched deeper into their own bodies. She ignored them. Samuel watched her as well, and a rather pleasant, cool, exhilarating feeling crept up from his stomach. The woman paced for several minutes—back and forth, back and forth—her eyes focused on the empty air a few feet in front of her. When she came to a stop, her body seemed to grow straighter and more rigid, though she had not stooped over at all as she walked. She reached into the pocket of her tunic and dug out some crumpled fragment of thin material and studied it in her hands. The colonists murmured to themselves in broken phrases tinged with obvious distress.“

“walkingwalkingstopwalkwalkingstopwalkingwalk…”

“…notherewhyhernothernotherewhyhere…”

“…gowaygowaygowaygoway…”

Samuel eased to his feet as the woman resumed her pacing, her light steps carrying her effortlessly across the great hall as she wove a straight path through the bolted-down furniture without ever appearing fully aware of its presence. She stopped in the center of the hall. The murmurs ceased. The woman glanced at the colonists strewn around the edges of the room, as if just noticing them for the first time. It appeared to Samuel—though he could never be sure—that her eyes rested on his for the briefest of moments, that they flashed that now-familiar glint of copper, and that her icy veneer was momentarily broken by a faint grin. She moved to the door. Without warning, it slammed shut in her face and she stopped in her tracks. A muffled creaking sound filled the room. The woman stepped to the door and pushed it open and the noise stopped. She slipped outside and was gone.

Throughout the hall, the other colonists resumed their bowed-head meditations with evident relief. Samuel walked to the door, clumsily dodging the furniture in his path, and blinked away the rain as he stepped outside. The sticky odor of sweet detritus struck him instantly. Everything was dead slate fog, the rain droplets materializing out of an earthbound cloud. The mountains were invisible. The few short trees oozed jadeite boughs to the muddied meadow that squished under his feet. Samuel could barely make out the distant figure picking her way across the slick turf. He wiped water from his brow and set out after her.

Upon first glance, the woman appeared to walk with no particular direction in mind. She meandered between buildings, ran her hands over their walls, stopped to stare at the sky. Yet her steps were quick and decisive; her gaze never wavered from its target. Samuel followed her without knowing why. The rain continued to fall in slow sheets. Even through the thick grayness, the woman must have noticed his presence, for despite his best efforts Samuel was less than stealthy in his pursuit. But if she did see him, she paid him no mind. At one point, her gaze passed directly over him and he felt his feet rooted to the soggy ground. But she looked away without reproach and they both went on, and Samuel felt the slightest bit encouraged at not being rejected.

Samuel followed the woman all around the dreary meadow. When they had traversed the entire field from fence line to fence line, crisscrossing over each of the little wooden footbridges that spanned the river, the woman returned to each sleeping hall in turn. She studied the buildings in detail, tracing circles around their perimeters and tugging at the locked doors. Samuel watched from a distance, crouched behind the corner of the nearest hall. As she moved toward the third sleeping hall, he rose from his hiding place and glimpsed a swath of muddied white cloth and the flash of little brown heels as another colonist turned the corner at the opposite end of his building. He came out into the open meadow, glanced over his shoulder and saw another woman following a path roughly parallel to his own. They walked on together through the unrelenting mist, and Samuel soon realized they were both following the same woman.

They eyed each other across the meadow, glancing back and forth from the copper-eyed woman to one another, until they gradually shifted their attention away from their target. Though there was some coarse polish to her movements, this new female was but a child learning to walk in the shadow of its mother in comparison to the grace of the copper-eyed woman. Soon they lost sight of her in the veils of silver mist. They followed a rough estimate of her course for a few minutes more until their paths drew closer and closer and finally intersected. They stopped and faced each other. The rain pitter-pattered on the leaves of the tree next to them. This new woman seemed to be about Samuel’s age, perhaps a year or two older. Her eyes were large and black, rather empty and without any spark. But though they emitted no light, they appeared to draw the world into them, collecting all the rays of light reflected by the objects caught in her gaze.

Samuel spoke first. “Hello.”

The woman’s big eyes grew even wider and she seemed to fade away from him, although in actuality she did not step back one centimeter.

She frowned furiously. “Hellohoweryou?”

“Goodtha—” Samuel began to reply and then stopped. That was not right. He tried to speak again, but his tongue and lips felt heavy and sluggish. “How… how are… you?” he managed.

Her face drained of emotion. “Goodthankshoweryou?” she said.

Now Samuel took a slow step backward. The woman opened her mouth but no words came out. She jerked a hand up mechanically, as if to grab his arm, and then just as quickly returned it to her side.

“Fine,” Samuel answered, as he took another step back. He skidded in the wet grass and looked down to catch his footing. Slick, brown mud bled amidst the sodden and broken turf. The woman started toward him, then hesitated and slowly retreated. She turned and scurried away. Samuel watched her flee across the meadow until the sheets of rain erased her fading figure. His waterlogged tunic clung fast to his skin and weighed heavily on his arms. He turned in the opposite direction and walked to the nearest meal hall.

* * *

The copper-eyed woman returned to Samuel’s meal hall late in the day. For about an hour the sun had been low enough in the sky to cut through the ashen shroud, but as it sunk lower the scarce light in the windows faded and died. The people ate their evening meal in dazed, perfunctory motions. Samuel ate and walked the hall while his clothes finished drying. Crumbs of food from the day’s previous meals dotted the floor and he brushed at them idly with his bare feet. He was still pacing when the woman entered. This time, he was sure her mouth was twisted into a private half-smirk, though this expression faded as she stepped inside and gazed around at the colonists seated against the walls. Samuel stopped in the middle of the hall, transfixed by her presence.

“Come,” she said from the doorway.

She turned and walked swiftly out the door into the rain. Samuel looked to see if the others would follow, but they all remained in place and avoided his eyes. He gave his tunic one final wring and started for the door, driven as much by his desire to pursue this woman as by a sudden distaste for the other colonists seated around him. Their eyes bored into his back as he exited the hall.

The woman was already well across the meadow, and he quickened his pace so as not to lose sight of her. She walked to the nearest sleeping hall and turned back and stared at Samuel through the distance between them, a gray shadow against the hazy backdrop of the hall. Then she rounded the corner of the building and was lost from sight. Samuel followed her to the hall. The door was open. He went inside, dried himself with the blankets from one bed and fell asleep in the bed next to it. He did not notice the second woman, the one with the large dark eyes, enter the hall about an hour later and curl up two beds over for the night.

He awoke the next morning from a dream of the copper-eyed woman. The first rays of sun peered through the high windows of the sleeping hall. The rain had stopped. The image of the copper-eyed woman remained fresh in his mind, and with it a single word seeped out of the deep folds of his subconscious. Hero. The copper-eyed woman was a hero, and thereafter Samuel would remember her as “the First Hero.”

V

Samuel did not see the First Hero again for some time. The woman simply seemed to disappear from the colony. About a week after her departure, the toilets broke down. At first this problem was scarcely noticeable, but within a few days waste began to accumulate in the toilets and the stench around the buildings became overwhelming. One morning the next week, the colonists approached the meal halls to find the doors locked. Few realized that the sun had just slipped over the horizon and the bells had sounded well in advance of mealtime. Sometime later, it stopped raining entirely, and the grass in the meadow turned brown and the trees began to wilt. Every one or two weeks a new incident arose: the doors of the toilets were locked, the beds in the sleeping halls disappeared, the meal and sleeping halls were not cleaned (although few of the colonists realized that they had ever been cleaned at all), and so on and so on.

But with every few crises, new heroes sprang up one by one from the uniform anonymity of Pearl’s population to meet the tests facing the colony. And one by one they all disappeared. Only those few, like Samuel, who were perceptive enough to realize they were different from the other colonists, ever appreciated them. They would be seen one day, striding coolly from the site of the most recent incident, their movements quick and precise, their faces aglow with some inner vitality, and the next day they would be conspicuously absent, with no hint as to their whereabouts.

Yet the fact that each of the many challenges was solved in relatively short order did little to subdue the fear that began to permeate the whole of the colony. The colonists continued to avoid one another, no longer engaging in idle play or lovemaking. They spent their days creeping across the meadow from hill to tree to hall, sometimes slipping to the stream for a drink, which they would take in several short sips, lifting their heads in between to gaze around them guardedly. They scurried over the open field, trying their best to keep a safe distance from anything that might possibly harm them. No one had any idea where the next crisis would originate, and so very often two colonists would find themselves averting some phantom terror, creeping backward into the protective shade of the same tree or hall, only to collide with one another in their blind fear and turn on the supposed intruder with the growl of a cornered feline.

At meal times, each colonist received his cake and slunk away to hide in a secluded corner or behind a shaded hill and eat with ravenous desperation, body hunched around his food, eyes wide and furtive. The people returned to the sleeping halls earlier and earlier each night. Some took their meal cakes to a bed against one of the walls where they could eat while keeping watch over the entire hall. They slept lightly, and many seemed to dream, waking at the least sound with a short, sharp cry and wild, staring eyes.

Yet Samuel never fell prey to the collective panic that embraced the rest of the colony. On the contrary, he remained calmly confident, buoyed both by some mysterious faith in the skill and ingenuity of the emerging heroes, and by some hopeful belief that the colonists as a whole were not so lost, not so helpless as they might seem. After his encounter in the rain with the First Hero, he took to following the other heroes around the colony. He enjoyed the sight of them at a distance as they slipped across the meadow or stood in quiet contemplation of the bleak façade of some inscrutable hall. And though their eventual departure always saddened him a bit, this feeling never lasted very long, because he was quite certain—though he knew not by what assurance—that no harm had befallen them, and was equally confident that the colony would never be at a lack for individuals such as these.

As a result, Samuel began to grow apart from the rest of the colony. Little by little, he became one of those figures whom the other colonists eyed warily as he passed, although Samuel ignored their stares. His thoughts were now devoted only to the heroes and to the peculiar female he had encountered while following the First Hero. Sometime later, he would come to call her Penny, but for now she remained a nameless woman who had captured his attention. He saw her occasionally as they shadowed the heroes, and their eyes would meet briefly across the empty expanse of kempt grass and silky sky, but they did not move nearer to each other, did not speak. Finally, weeks after their first meeting, Samuel found her by the river and approached her.

He came up behind her as she knelt to drink, and when she sensed his presence, she arose with a start and whirled to face him. Perhaps because she did not immediately recognize him, perhaps because some part of her was still bound by the fear that engulfed the other colonists, her black eyes at first widened with animal terror and a low sound began in her throat, part growl, part muffled shriek of fear and surprise. Samuel recoiled at the sight of this face, so unlike that of the woman he had first met some weeks ago and so much like the faces of all the other colonists.

But then she recognized him, her face softened, and she cast her eyes downward as her cheeks turned the faintest shade of pink.

“Hello,” she murmured. “How are you?”

Samuel exhaled with relief. “I am fine, thank you. How are you?” He had been carefully formulating these few words ever since their first meeting.

“Goodthankshow—” she began to answer but stopped. Her thin, pale lips widened and parted to reveal two rows of small, brilliant white teeth. She continued gingerly. “I’ve been… very well, thank you.”

For the first time in his life, Samuel truly laughed. He threw back his head and his body shook with the sheer joy of this connection with another human being. Penny waited, quite obviously pleased with herself. Her next words were more stilted, and her brow creased as she ground them out.

“I’m glad to… see you… again.”

“I’m glad… to see you again too,” he responded.

She brushed at the feathery grass with a bare foot and wrung the edge of her tunic in her hands. Samuel imagined himself crouched by the stream, trying to drink from his cupped palms before the water slipped between his fingers.

“I’m glad to talk to you too.” He forced the words out urgently.

She looked back up at him and bobbed her head. Behind her, the sun grew larger as it descended in the sky, and its last desperate rays outlined her body in fire.

“You follow them too,” he said.

“Yes, yes,” she replied. “Like… you.” Her face creased with the strain required to make even this simple statement, but it lit up again once she had done so.

They stared at each other in silence. The wind picked up and swirled through the meadow, throwing up little wavelets in the stream and bringing a welcome chill to the air. There were so many things Samuel wanted to ask. Instead he merely asked, “Why?”

But she shrugged her shoulders gaily, and the lines which had furrowed her face and brow melted away. The tightness inside Samuel ceased all at once, as though a blow to his chest had robbed his lungs of air. He knew the moment was gone. He made the slightest motion to turn and go. She stepped forward, fell in step beside him and they walked together along the river bank. He followed her lead, though the pleasantness of her company now seemed just the tiniest bit hollow. For her part, she smiled carelessly as the river murmured softly beside them and the sun bloomed pink and orange and then wilted and died, and the sound of bells rang out across the colony.

* * *

They entered the nearest meal hall in the fading light and ate their evening meal together. Then she left him and scrambled away across the meadow, turning back once to wave goodbye. Samuel walked in the near darkness for some time, alone with his thoughts. When he made his way to the nearest sleeping hall, he found the hall door closed. A group of colonists milled about the entrance in little circles and murmured to themselves. Others sat cross-legged on the grass, their chins in their hands. Samuel wove through the small crowd and went to the door. He pulled hard, but it did not budge. A soft moan of defeat escaped the lips of one or two of the colonists. The rest of them lay down in the grass with an air of resignation and tried to fall asleep.

VI

The doors of the sleeping halls remained locked for several days. Samuel spent each night outside of one of the halls, hardly sleeping as he awaited the arrival of a new hero. During the days, he roamed across the colony, visiting each of the five sleeping halls in turn, then starting all over again at the first, hoping to spot this new champion. For he never doubted that someone, somewhere in the colony would step forward and resolve this latest problem.

On the fourth day of this routine, Samuel stretched himself out comfortably on the sunny grass outside one of the halls to continue his vigil. A few colonists still lingered outside the building, either too weary, discouraged or wretchedly bound to the faint hope that the doors would somehow open of their own accord in the very near future to do anything else. As he lay there in the soft grass, Samuel began to grow restless. He stood up and strolled around the hall, unsure of why he was doing it other than that it seemed more appealing than lying in the sun and waiting and watching.

He made a few slow trips around the building, gazing up at the walls as he went, then stopped in front of the door. Samuel tugged on the handle but it did not open. He pulled harder, shaking the locked door against its frame. The low rattling was enough to disturb the few people around the hall, and they looked up at Samuel and murmured to themselves and shied away. Samuel ignored them, gave up his struggle with the door and stepped back. A strange feeling arose in him, something he had not quite experienced before. It reminded him of when, as a child at play, another child had accidentally knocked him to the ground and he had felt a heat rising from his neck and shoulders, tightening the muscles there and warming his face. Yet his emotion now was not directed at another person, but at the door of this very hall. The feeling tempered quickly to a controlled simmer; his face cooled, his muscles relaxed, and the wild chaos of his mind from that initial rush of emotion condensed into a single, purposeful thought.

He moved to the door once more. Nobody was there to observe him—the colonists nearby had turned away from the fearful sight and paid him little heed now that the noise had stopped—but had anyone been watching him, they would have noticed that his few steps to the door were strong and smooth, that his whole body seemed at once rigid and relaxed, that the muscles in his legs scarcely tensed to move his body forward, but in this minimal tension there was no wasted energy, that his body was truly alive for one brief moment. They would have also noticed that his face bore no signs of his momentary anger, that he did not frown or scowl or furrow his brow, but pressed his lips together gamely as the faint light in his deep, dark eyes now rose to the surface.

Samuel crouched in front of the door, ran his hand over the cool metal surface, then along the narrow space between the door and the frame, standing up to reach the top. He stepped back and studied the entryway again, then leaned in to examine the space between the door and the frame, scanning with his eye the narrow gap his hand had traced seconds before. In the darkened crevice he could just make out the shadow of the bolt. Samuel grasped the handle and pulled it hard, all the while studying the frame, hinges and bolt. He saw that the door was meant to open and close by turning on its hinges but that the bolt now restricted this motion. But how to remove this part? Samuel stood back. He was calm now; the sudden anger that had filled him some moments ago was gone. He walked around the hall, studying it as he went, the problem of the door and the gap and the bolt always on his mind. After passing twice around the building, he sat and stared at the placid stone façade, lost in thought, until the sound of bells signaled the evening meal.

He walked to the nearest meal hall with the door still on his mind. It was not until he reached the hall and saw the other colonists with their meal cakes that he realized he was actually quite hungry. He stood in line, eagerly awaiting his share of food, but once he received it he was overcome by a desire to eat as fast as he could and return to the sleeping hall. Samuel was so deep in thought as he returned from his meal that he did not notice Penny had followed him. She sat against the side of the sleeping hall and watched him as the daylight faded and he circled the building time and again, stopping every so often to approach the hall and study a crack in the masonry or white-painted door, then backing away again, some new detail either filed away in his thoughts or dismissed as unimportant. She waited for him each time he appeared around the corner of the hall, walked toward her and passed on by, but she did not call out to him. Samuel wished she would join him in his work, though he feared to ask. And Penny’s doting gaze never wavered as she watched him stride pensively around the hall. Finally, when the last rays of the sun withered away and the blackness and starlight closed in, he came and sat next to her.

She turned to look up at him, her throat long and pale under the rising moon. “You are like them,” she said in her careful and deliberate way, and this simple statement of admiration at once thrilled and frightened him. He looked away, out into the darkened meadow.

“No,” he said. “There will be another.” Yet, for the first time, he did not truly believe it.

The silver-blue moon settled above the mountains, and they lay down in the grass outside the hall. Penny fell asleep within a few minutes, but Samuel lay awake for a long time, his body drained but his mind restless.

VII

When Samuel awoke in the morning, Penny was gone. The sun had risen some hours ago but had not yet climbed above the height of the sleeping hall, leaving him still in the shade. He was alone. Whatever colonists had spent the night outside the hall had already wandered off. The bells sounded for the morning meal, but he was not hungry. Instead, he resumed his pacing around the hall, stopping only when he heard the midday bells and the pangs in his stomach overcame him, and every now and again to sit at the base of the hall and think. Penny came and went twice, but they did not speak.

As the afternoon wore on, Samuel’s patience waned. His breaks from circling the building came more frequently, and when he stopped to sit against the hall, his mind strayed more readily from the problem at hand. His imagination was exhausted, and he was still no closer to finding any semblance of a way into the locked building. He thought about leaving the hall, just for an hour or so, to walk in the meadow and clear his mind, and as the late afternoon sun beat down upon him he longed to immerse himself in the cool currents of the river. But he forced himself to stay, resolved not to abandon his efforts, even for a few moments, and to keep circling the hall, keep thinking, in the belief that there must be some little detail he had overlooked.

The bells tolled for the evening meal, but Samuel ignored them and kept on with his work. The sun set, bringing relief from the heat of the day, and soon the moon rose, its turquoise light shimmering on the creamy façade of the hall, like the surface of the stone that was the planet’s namesake. In this soft reflection Samuel was struck by the vital detail which had eluded him all day long: a set of narrow, horizontal grooves cut into the stone of one side of the hall. He happened to pass them just as the moon reached a certain height where its reflected light caught the wall and filled the grooves with a faint blue glow.

Samuel leapt to the wall and ran his hand over its smooth surface. His fingers slipped neatly into the grooves, which were about as wide as his body and just high enough from top to bottom to give his fingers purchase. They were spaced unevenly up the height of the wall and stopped just below a cracked open window. Perhaps, had he been less excited by this discovery, Samuel might have noticed these notches were not part of the building’s original design. They were roughly made, and their edges were sharp, not rounded and smoothed with age and wear, and in some places the paint had been scraped away to reveal the dark gray rock underneath.

But Samuel noticed none of these details. Instead, he saw at once that his fingers fit the grooves, that the grooves led up to the window, that the window was open, and that the combination of these elements represented a way into the otherwise impenetrable hall. He pressed his fingers into the wall and tried to climb. But he was exhausted. He had spent the entire day sweltering in the hot sun, walking countless circles around the sleeping hall, racking his brain for some clue that would grant him access to the locked building. He had eaten only one meal, and his body was completely worn out. So despite his fervent desire to get inside the sleeping hall, Samuel decided to rest for the night.

He lay down next to the wall under the grooves, afraid he might lose them in the daylight without the moon’s reflection to guide him. It seemed as though he scarcely slept, but in the morning he felt refreshed, and when he slid his fingers into the notches he found his arms had regained some of their strength. He took one last deep breath, flexed his legs, dug his fingers in as far as he could and began to climb.

The ascent was arduous. The notches were just large enough to admit the height of his fingers, but only deep enough to allow them to penetrate to the second joint. There were no footholds. He found he could just rest the edges of his toes on the bottoms of the grooves, and that this tiniest of holds gave his fingertips some aid in supporting the weight of his body. Up he went, slowly, inexorably, bent at the waist with his rear end protruding. His fingers burned as they gripped the narrow notches while his feet scrabbled for whatever hold they could find. At one point his toes slipped and he dangled by his fingertips from the wall, the tiny muscles in his hands and forearms on fire, the rough stone scraping his fingers raw. He kicked frantically to regain a hold on the wall, refusing to drop back down to the ground, and after a long few seconds his toes found holds once more and he resumed his climb.

Nearly five agonizing minutes passed before he managed to reach his right hand into the slightly opened window. He clung to the sill and pulled the window all the way open with his left. With the last of his strength, he used both arms to hoist himself up and through the window frame, then dropped safely onto one of the beds below.

The first rays of sunlight crept through the high windows, providing scant illumination to the inside of the hall, but Samuel managed to find his way among the rows of beds to the door in the gray half-darkness. He ran his eyes and hands over the door until he found the lock. He fumbled with it for a few moments, pushing, pulling, turning it back and forth, until he noticed the metallic clicking sound that emanated from the area of the bolt each time he turned the latch. In the hall’s scarce light Samuel could not see the bolt in the gap between the door and frame, but he guessed correctly that each turn of the lock must move the bolt in and out of this space. He turned the latch to the left and pushed hard on the door. Almost to his surprise, it opened quite easily.

The wind rushed in and swelled around him as the door swung open to reveal the freshly sunlit meadow. Samuel stood still for a moment and reveled in the cool morning breeze that danced past him into the hall, in the grass rustling softly beneath his feet and the twinkling rays of the newly risen sun. He breathed the clean morning air with a new appreciation, even though he had spent but a few minutes in the previously enclosed and rather stale-smelling room. Then a great fatigue overcame him. He found the nearest bed, flopped into it and fell into a deep sleep, a wide grin still pasted across his face.

VIII

Samuel 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 from 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

Samuel 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.

X

Frozen in place, Samuel and Penny stared dumbly as the furniture emerged from the depths of the floor, dripping with some unknown liquid. Their momentary hesitation, coupled with the weight of the whole apparatus, caused the panel to slip from their grasp. It slammed into the floor with a crash that resounded through the silent hall and shook the ground beneath their feet. They looked at each other and their eyes locked.

As one they crouched to the floor. Samuel pushed the broken latch back into the seam and raised the square just far enough to give their fingers purchase. Together they lifted the panel, not watching or speaking to one another yet perfectly aware of what the other was doing, trusting the other’s mind as much as they trusted their own. As the section rotated away from them, they struggled to lift it any farther from the end where they stood, so they stepped around the corners of the hole and continued to rotate the panel as they walked along the edge of the square toward the central axis. The section balanced in the middle, having been rotated ninety degrees from its initial position. One side of the panel was bare and on the opposite side was the furniture, a bolted-down circular table surrounded by a set of equally well-fastened chairs, all glistening wet in the midday sunlight. Half a meter below the floor the dark liquid splashed about softly.

For a moment Samuel forgot the whole purpose behind opening this door. That all the furniture in all the meal halls throughout the entire colony could be rotated into the floor, that someone or something had presumably done so, that below the surface in which he and the other colonists ate their meals three times each day there existed this veritable lake of unknown liquid—the whole thing was unbelievable. He tried to imagine how far this space must extend under the floor, what else might lie down there, what might lie beneath the floors of the other meal halls, the sleeping halls… And then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, he stepped to the edge of the hole and began to lower himself inside. Penny gave a short shriek and grabbed at his hands as he hung from the edge of the hole.

“What are you doing?” she cried. But he had already dipped his legs into the cool liquid and was now dangling at arm’s length from the edge. He felt his toes scrape a surface at the bottom of the pool.

“It’s all right,” he told her, letting go of the floor. As he did so, the thrill of exploration was replaced by a millisecond of sheer terror. But then his feet landed safely on solid ground and the exhilaration returned.

“I can stand,” he said, chest-deep in the fluid. He stomped on the floor for good measure but the noise was muffled in the black depths.

Penny knelt at the hole and stared at him with pursed lips. Her hands gripped the edge of the opening, palms to the floor, fingers curled beneath it. The early afternoon sunlight streaming in through the windows of the hall threw an eerie glow into the underground chamber and reflected off the liquid and wet furniture that hung from the bottom of the floor, kaleidoscoping obliquely between this inky sea and low sky. In the half-darkness, the liquid seemed to flow on forever in all directions. The spectral tables and chairs cast long shadows through the weird orange-gray light and into the blackness, shadows that overlapped upon one another and shimmered with the slow undulation of the murky liquid, the empty sloshing sound only serving to reinforce the isolation of this place. The chamber had the look and sound of hollow death but the smell of freshness, of life. For the liquid was not purely water. It foamed slightly as Samuel moved, and when he put a finger to his mouth, he found it had a faintly bitter taste.

From up above the meal hall floor came a swift, dull thud. Penny glanced over her shoulder and when she turned back her face was creased with confusion and worry.

“The door,” she said. “The door…” She raised her hands and clapped them together once.

“It’s fine,” said Samuel. “I’m—we—are fine.”

But he began to make his way back under the hole nonetheless. Penny crouched at the edge and stared down into the liquid gloom, biting her lip. Her knuckles were white where her fingers wrapped around the floor, and she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. A low rumble began out beyond the darkness. The liquid started to splash about more urgently. Samuel half-walked, half-paddled through the growing current. He was about to leap up and grab the edge of the hole when the floor below him erupted.

The jets of water stung his feet and propelled him upward until his head scraped the bottom of the floor. By the time he fell back under, the liquid had begun to foam violently. It scorched his eyes as soon as he submerged and he clamped them shut. The pure white suds exploded through the hole above him and Penny fell back with a scream. Samuel heard her muffled cry but could make out nothing else. The jets seemed to come from all directions. They cartwheeled him through the stormy liquid before he had a chance to do anything and peppered his body with the force of a hundred tiny fists. The bitter fluid surged into his nose and mouth and burned as it ran down the back of his throat. He coughed and gasped and inhaled nothing but liquid. He flailed his arms, kicked out his legs. Thousands of invisible eddies flung him about without mercy. He could not decide if his lungs would burst or collapse. He kicked out again. His feet struck something solid. He kicked and pushed and threw his arms overhead and his knuckles cracked on the unforgiving metal of the floor before the whirling current caught him again. But he righted himself this time and hit the bottom and jumped with searching hands. One found the edge of the hole but began to slide immediately under the film of slickery liquid. He threw up the other and grabbed with both hands and pulled as Penny caught him and hauled him out by his arms.

Samuel rolled onto his back and rubbed his eyes and coughed up a lungful of the vile liquid as Penny shook him and slapped at his chest and shoulders. It was not until he had partially cleared his eyes and she started to come back into focus that he realized she was not attempting to revive him. Her eyes were wide and her mouth flapped open and closed but no words emerged. Then the sound faded back in and he could hear her screaming “Up, up, up, up, up!”

He looked past her. His vision reeled as he shifted his gaze. As best he could tell, there was something moving toward them along the ground from the long wall behind her. He pushed himself up to a seat and vomited a little in his mouth. Penny dragged him the rest of the way to his feet. The ivory foam continued to bubble through the divided hole in the meal hall floor. He stared at the wall behind her as she started to push him backward. The seam was gone, replaced by a half-meter opening at the bottom of the wall. And through that hole, attached to several unfurling metal arms, crawled a flat rectangular mop that stretched the entire length of the meal hall.

It advanced toward them steadily. There was nowhere to go. They could not get around it and it had already passed the door of the hall and cut off their only exit. Neither Samuel nor Penny had ever seen such an instrument in their lives. But it did not appear dangerous. They waited until it almost covered their toes and then simply stepped over it. It continued on to the opposite wall. The section below the seam receded up into the wall and the mop ventured all the way inside the exposed chamber, paused and then drew back across the floor, hovering a few centimeters above the ground.

The mop moved faster on its return, but they stepped over it easily once more. It retreated into the wall and the lower partition slid back into place. The noise from beneath the floor stopped. The foam that had pushed through the hole shivered and whispered and began to subside. The half-turned section began to rotate back into the floor. Samuel and Penny recovered their senses long enough to catch it and hold it in place. Something near the panel’s axis ground and screeched in response, but they managed to keep their hold. All around them a series of muffled clanks sounded from below the floor. Then the force on the panel ceased, and Samuel and Penny righted the square back to neutral.

The door to the hall swung open and a slight breeze swept in. Samuel dropped to his back and closed his eyes and took several deep breaths. His eyes stung and he could still taste hints of the bitter liquid. His tunic was soaked and his skin slick and he felt like diving into the river to wash this feeling from his body. And with this thought, he realized the acrid, slippery liquid below the floor must clean the furniture. He could think of no other explanation. And since no one in the colony realized the furniture never grew dirty, no one thought it must somehow be cleaned. Even Samuel had to admit he had never noticed that the furniture in the meal halls—in fact all the furniture in all the buildings in the entire colony—was never really dirty. He sat up. Penny glowered at him, unable to speak.

“Come. Let’s turn it back,” Samuel said.

They walked to opposite sides of the hole, their movements efficient and tense. Together they rotated the platform about its axis and returned the furniture to the meal hall surface. The square stopped abruptly just centimeters before settling into the plane of the floor. They gave an extra push, but the final few degrees of rotation had been blocked at the side where they had first lifted the door by a metal bar sandwiched between the underside of the floor and the furniture-side of the door.

“Turn it back,” Samuel said, and they lifted the platform to balance halfway, the table and chairs hanging off one side like some wild host of giant alien insects clinging to a tree in a storm. Samuel knelt to study the obstructing bar and found that it slid easily under the floor. They resumed their positions on the sides of the platform and rotated it back into place, returning the first set of furniture to its natural position in the meal hall.

Samuel had never before witnessed mechanical precision of this scale and his mind trembled at the slightest thought of the effort that must take place, unnoticed, behind the smooth veneer of the colony at every single moment of every single day. But he grasped enough. The entirety of each hall—furniture and floors—was cleaned periodically in the manner they had just witnessed. The hall doors would close and lock of their own accord. The tables and chairs were washed beneath the floor, the floor was mopped, and then the furniture was flipped right-side-up and the main door reopened. But during this most recent incident, a bolt under each floor panel had been slipped into place to ensure the panels could not complete their full rotation and return the furniture to the upper surface. The result was an empty meal hall with conspicuous seams surrounding clusters of protrusions in the floor. The presence of these bolts under the floor meant the doors could be opened from the surface only by lifting them from the bolted end. But once they had been removed, the doors could rotate as usual, and the meal halls could function as normal.

Samuel and Penny spent the rest of the afternoon turning over all the hidden doors in all the meal halls of the colony and releasing the bolts that blocked their rotation. The underground ocean remained calm as they worked. The hall door stayed open and the mop remained in the wall. And when the last bolt was removed, the last door turned, the colony’s untroubling façade was restored once more.

* * *

Samuel did not see Penny for several days after that. He came across her as she exited a meal hall one evening, meal cake in hand. Her face flickered to life when she saw him, but the light there seemed just a bit fainter.

“Wait for me?” he said, and she nodded.

He took his food and met her outside and they sat atop a low, rolling hill from where they could see the sunset. The shadows of the halls overtook them as they ate.

“Those doors…” Samuel began, after they had finished their cakes.

“Yes,” Penny said, staring at her hands in her lap. “But you fixed them.”

“We fixed them,” he said, hoping to draw her out. She looked down and said nothing. “But the holes, the water, the… the…” He mushroomed his hands to demonstrate the foam rising out of the hole. “The lock…” He turned to her helplessly.

Her stammer returned. “I… I… do not know.”

The sun dipped halfway below the mountains. Samuel struggled against the thoughts that surged up inside him, growing and collapsing all at once, fought to crystallize them into a single, solid idea.

“The lock,” he said. “Someone put it there. But wh—”

“I do not know,” she repeated, and her voice had the same stale quality as the colony’s bells. She was gone now, dissolving in the softly waning sunlight. When she turned back to him, calmly and without intention, her old smile had returned, creeping blindly across her lips, melting her face into an empty mask. The softness threatened to embalm him, but he fought it now, his mind hardening to a single point, his emotions close behind.

“But you were there.” He wanted to shake her. “You saw what I did. Don’t you…”

He seemed almost to reach her, for her brow began to wrinkle. But then the mask slid into place once more. The words died in his throat. He stared at her for some time, refusing to believe this was the same woman who had turned open the secret doors of the colony with him just a few days ago. He said “good night” then. He could not bear to look at that face one moment longer. Feeling as though the strength had been sapped from his legs, he stood up and walked away. The sun set. The colony grew dark.

XI

The sun rose the next morning and brought light back to the colony. In the early morning rays, the edges of things shimmered, mirage-like, and it was not until the sun was high in the sky, its sharp beams pounding down upon the meadow, that the lines would harden again and become distinct. Shortly before the morning meal, a colonist endeavoring to cross the river in the center of the colony noticed the bridge he was about to use had been shattered straight down the middle. The colonist did not bother to see if the other bridges might still be passable. Though he had spent much of his life frolicking in the cool currents and could easily stand in the center of the stream without his head dipping below the surface, he did not attempt to swim or ford the river. Instead, he withdrew from the bank with a few stumbling steps backward, tripped over his own feet and fell to a seat on the ground. The morning breeze tiptoed through the high grass along the river bank. The colonist sat with his knees hugged to his chest as he stared blindly at the broken bridge and rocked back and forth, trembling like a frail leaf in the wind.

Samuel did not notice the broken bridge until that afternoon. He had spent the morning as he had spent the previous few days, walking aimless and alone about the colony. When the sun waned in the afternoon sky, he climbed the tallest tree he could find and gazed out over the meadow. He noticed the crowds along the river at once. Just beyond them he could see the bridge cracked neatly down the middle with its two broken ends dipping into the stream. Farther down the river he could just make out the fracture in the center of the next bridge. He shimmied down the tree and set off, jogging toward the river.

The crowd had dissipated by the time he arrived, so there was no one to disturb Samuel’s study of the broken bridge. It was a modest construction, yet remarkably sturdy. Two arced wooden planks spanned the river with more planks laid across them to form the walkway. But this bridge had been completely shattered, much of the wood ripped free altogether and long since borne away by the lazy current, leaving only the two ends stretching out hopelessly from opposite shores.

Samuel inspected the other bridges in the colony and found that all five had indeed been broken in much the same manner. But on the fourth bridge he visited, he discovered a small scrap of paper caught between two of the broken planks. There was a picture drawn on it by some rough black implement, and it was torn on one side.

Samuel picked up the scrap of paper, studied it for a moment, then folded it and placed it in the pocket of his tunic. He did not see how it could help him solve the problem at hand, but he resolved to examine it more closely later. He went to bed that night looking forward to the next morning when he would find a way to repair the bridges.

* * *

When the sun rose, Samuel scampered out of bed and waded into the center of the river. He managed to lift the fractured ends of one bridge over his head, but the two halves no longer even met in the middle. He would need to replace the missing middle section entirely. He climbed back ashore and examined one of the broken halves from the river bank. He had never noticed the well-worn nail heads that lined the edges of the cross planks before now. Samuel turned one of the little metal spikes over in his hand. Many of them had been ripped out when the bridge was destroyed and he had no idea where to find more of them, nor how to affix them to the bridge. As such, the task before him was more than daunting, but no more so than the problem of the missing meal hall furniture. And in this instance, he at least had some idea of how to proceed. He decided to ignore his lack of nails and tools for the time being and focus on finding wood.

He was drawn immediately to the few trees in the meadow, noting the similarities between their stubby, twisted limbs and the material that made up the bridges right away. But he was not strong enough on his own to break off any branches of sufficient size to both connect the two ends of the bridge and withstand any substantial weight.

A handful of colonists drifted about nearby. “Hello,” Samuel called to them. “Can you help me?”

They returned his words with blank stares. He gestured to a nearby tree and made a breaking motion with his hands. They turned their backs and shied away. Samuel started to go after them but stopped, knowing he could never reach them.

He resigned himself to looking for other sources of wood. Starting along the river, Samuel moved outward through the colony, searching along a path of concentric circles. By the time the bells sounded for the evening meal, he had come to the fence that marked the outer boundary of the colony. The fence consisted of rough cylindrical poles driven into the ground a meter or so apart. Two cylindrical cross poles joined adjacent fence posts and were fitted into holes on each support post. This fence surrounded the entire colony. Beyond it, several kilometers in the distance, the dark mountains rudely interrupted the verdant landscape. As far as Samuel knew, no colonist had ever crossed beyond this border.

He had found the wood supply to repair the bridges. Yet Samuel hesitated for a moment before disassembling the fence and harvesting the poles. Someone must have built the fence for a reason. The thought of so callously tearing it down inspired some faint tug in his stomach. He wondered if he should not frustrate that mysterious purpose, whatever it was. But what use could such a fence possibly serve? Anything it was meant to keep in or out could surely pass over, under or through such a basic construction. He rested a hand on one of the support posts and gave it a tentative push. The post shifted sideways. The top cross pole began to ease out of its hole.

The meadow around him was empty. The mountains loomed closer than they had ever seemed before, powerful and timeless across a short expanse of lush green field. Samuel put both hands on the post and pushed hard. The pole leaned sideways under his weight. He pushed until it tilted far enough to remove the top cross pole from its hole. The other end of the cross pole slid easily out of its place in the opposite post. The upper cross pole in the other direction came out with even less effort, and then the lower cross poles after that. Samuel worked methodically for the rest of the day, neglecting his evening meal. When the sun set, he lay down next to the fence and slept. He awoke with the sunrise and continued his task. Soon he had removed more than two dozen poles from the fence. The morning bells reminded him he was hungry, and he set off for the nearest meal hall. As he walked, he estimated that he must have enough wood to at least make a start on repairing the bridges, even if he could not complete all of them. He now needed to move all that wood from the fence at the very edge of the colony to the river in the middle, and once there, attach it to the remaining framework of the bridges.

Despite the time it would take, there seemed no alternative to carrying the poles by hand from the fence to the river. Samuel knew there was no hope of enlisting the aid of the other colonists, and after their last conversation he was not sure whether to ask Penny for help. He resolved to do the job himself, so he devoured his morning meal and returned to the fence to begin the task.

He found he could carry two poles at a time by cradling them horizontally against his chest. It took him about ten minutes to move the poles from the fence to the nearest bridge and then walk back to the fence again, so it was almost time for the midday meal once he had completed the job. He ate under a tree by the river and rested.

Having brought the wood to the river, Samuel still faced the problem of how to fit and attach it to the bridge’s now-dilapidated framework. The fence poles were too long to neatly fit the width of the bridge and much heavier than the planks which currently spanned the walkway. He would have to cut them down somehow. He recalled the broken piece of the meal hall window latch he had stored in the pocket of his tunic. He took it out and struck the broken end against the nearest fencepost. The sharpened edge sunk a few centimeters into the wood. It was an imperfect tool, but it was all he could find. There still remained the problem of affixing the wood to the bridges, but given that he was already limited by available materials, Samuel decided some of the bridges would have to be sacrificed, at least for now. He scouted the five bridges in the colony and estimated he could salvage enough nails from three of the bridges to repair the other two. He promised himself he would mend the other three as soon as he could acquire the necessary materials.

The next morning, Samuel began his work in earnest. It was the first time in his life he had performed any manual labor for an extended period of time, and the small muscles of his hands and wrists quickly grew knotted and tired from hours of holding, manipulating and cutting the wooden poles. By the end of the first day, several blisters had formed on his hands and most of them had torn open. His back ached from stooping over the poles, his shoulders and forearms from chopping at the wood with the broken latch. Yet there was a part of him that reveled in this physical discomfort, a part of him that saw beyond the slow and painstaking work and envisioned the end products of his labor and all the tiny steps in between, all the pieces of himself he thrust greedily, feverishly, into his work, so that each single solitary moment during his time by the river was transformed into something that was entirely his, that belonged solely to his mind and body, nourished by his sweat and blood. He felt neither sleeping nor eating had ever been so rewarding. He savored each meal, each collapse into bed, but looked forward even more to the point when these mere physical needs would be satisfied and he could resume his labor.

Penny visited occasionally, though she kept her distance. She sat on the river bank and watched the easy way he worked, a body operating in perfect synchronization with an alert and active mind, reminiscent of those first heroes they had once admired together.

It took Samuel nearly six days to repair the two bridges. Cutting the fence poles into planks alone took almost five. Once the planks were ready, he raised each half from where it dangled in the water to align the walkways. On more than one occasion, a half-bridge collapsed back into the river and he had to raise it up once more. He used the edge of the broken latch to pry up nails from the first, third and fifth bridges, doing his best to take only those nails which held broken planks, so the basic structures of these bridges would remain more or less intact. With these recovered nails, Samuel affixed his hand-cut planks to the bridges using a large rock as a rudimentary hammer.

The repaired bridges were imperfect at best, yet quite impressive given Samuel’s relative lack of tools and building experience. The new planks stuck out haphazardly on either side of the bridges, and though he had tried to chisel away most of the splinters with the broken latch, they were still considerably rougher than the originals. Yet the bridges held. Samuel walked over them several times, rolled and carried fence poles across, even jumped up and down in the middles, and still they remained intact. Late one morning, more than a week since the day he had started this project, the bridges were complete. Samuel leaned against a tree along the river bank and rested. He tried to remain as inconspicuous as possible, knowing the other colonists had grown wary of his presence, yet he felt almost giddy with excitement as he waited for the first person to cross his bridge.

After about an hour, a middle-aged woman approached, leading a child by the hand. She stopped at the edge of the river, as if suddenly recalling the bridges had been broken. But the child, not sensing anything was amiss, slipped from his caretaker’s grasp and continued straight onto the bridge. The woman returned to her senses and let out a short, choked yelp. She glanced around, then stepped forward cautiously. By now, the child was halfway across and had scampered well beyond the newly repaired middle section by the time the woman caught up with him. She lifted the child in her arms, and only once she had reassured herself of his safety did she dare look around her and observe that the bridge was intact, that she had crossed beyond the halfway point of the river and could continue safely to the other side. She did so now, bearing the child in her arms, and looking furtively about her once she reached the other side before disappearing behind the nearest hall. The bells sounded and Samuel realized he was starving. His legs felt light and fresh as he stood and set off toward the nearest hall for the midday meal.

XII

Samuel forgot about the piece of paper he had discovered at the broken bridge until a few days later. He had carried it with him in the pocket of his tunic ever since he found it, along with the broken window latch that was now a bit duller from so much use. It was raining. He sat cross-legged on the bed he had slept in the night before as the thick drops streaked the windows of the sleeping hall. Feeling rather bored, he reached into his pocket and dug out the now-crumpled scrap.

The paper—the first sample he had ever encountered of such a material—was tough and fibrous, similar to papyrus, but not as crisp. The picture was scratched on one side in broad, mottled, black lines. The other side was blank. Two of the edges were perfectly even and came together at a square corner while the other two edges were ragged and appeared to have been torn or roughly cut. On the longer, torn edge, Samuel could just make out another short black stroke that disappeared beyond the tear, as though this drawing were part of a larger picture which had been ripped away.

He was studying this scrap when Penny approached his bedside. He did not notice her until she stood right next to him, and his stomach flip-flopped when he sensed her presence.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” Samuel answered. “How are you?”

“Finethankshow—” she began, then, “I’m just fine, thank you.” She forced her lips wider as she repeated her old joke. “And how are you?”

“Very well, thank you,” said Samuel. He recalled the first time she had spoken those words. It was good to see her again, to hear her voice. And yet the same questions bubbled up inside him once more. He wanted to provoke her, drag her from the shadowy cave into which she had retreated the last time they spoke. But he did not know how to begin. He looked back down at the scrap of paper and rotated it mechanically in his hands. She took a cautious step forward to stand by his shoulder.

“It’s a bed,” she said after a moment.

“What?” He did not quite hear her at first, and continued to turn the paper even as he looked up at her. She leaned over him and gently rotated the paper in his hands.

“It’s a bed.”

Samuel stared at the picture. Then he stood up and glanced back and forth between the picture and his own bed. She was right. The drawing was unmistakably a picture of a bed. He had a strange impulse to throw his arms around her, but that did not seem right anymore. He sat back down and gazed at the scrap of paper as Penny slid down beside him.

“It is a bed,” he muttered. “But… why?”

He looked at her hopefully. She shook her head and shrugged.

He pressed on. “It was on one of the bridges. One of the broken bridges. The ones I fixed.”

“I watched you,” she said.

“But how did it… why…” Dimly he sensed an important difference between the picture on the torn scrap of paper and much of the world around him, the same difference that distinguished the bridges from the river beneath them, the fence from the trees it surrounded.

“Someone made this!” he blurted out. The sound of his voice shocked him, as though his uttering the phrase created the very thought in his mind.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Someone made this!” He stabbed at the paper with his finger. “Someone made this picture, on this paper. Someone made this. Just like someone made this bed, and this building, and…” He could scarcely believe the words tumbling from his lips. “Someone made this,” he continued, “and someone left it on the bridge.”

He looked at her to see if she understood. Her face bore a fiercely contemplative frown. He could imagine the struggle in her mind, for he had passed through it himself many times before. It was like being trapped in a deep and narrow shaft of water, clawing your way to the surface, to the light. You did not always make it. Sometimes the light went out before you could reach the air, and you felt a momentary stab of panic before your consciousness gave way and you drowned. Sometimes you gave in of your own accord, succumbed to the cool and peaceful blackness, relaxed the struggle. But still the panic was there at the end, though muted this time, spread flat like a trampled meal cake and overwhelmed by resignation and relief.

Penny stared at his wrists just above his hands, which still held the picture. “Someone made it.” She thrust the words out one by one. “They… draw it, draw it with…”

Her vocabulary failed her. But it was enough. The strain in her voice told Samuel that she understood, that she was not just repeating his words.

“Yes,” he said. A rock inside his chest melted away. “They dr—made it with… a crayon… something like a crayon.”

“Yes,” she said, and her face lit up with the sheer exhausted elation of having at last, if only for one brief moment, crawled out of the dark pool to lay stretched on her back on some rocky shore, gasping at the fresh air, soaking in the sun’s radiant warmth.

“And someone left it on the bridge,” he continued.

She bobbed her head, even as the hard certainty in her face began to soften.

He pushed on, hoping not to lose her. “But why? Why did they leave it there?”

It was the wrong tack. The question frightened her. It was like watching someone being sucked into quicksand. Her body did not move, but in her face and eyes he could see her legs kicking, her arms flailing wildly.

“Maybe… maybe…” She was almost under now, her hands grasped vainly at anything they could find: branches, grass, dirt; everything gave way under her weight, nothing could stop her slide. “Maybe they lost it.” And then she was gone.

Outside the rain mustered one last salvo, drumming on the glass panes as the sky blackened and obscured the windows with shadow. They sat together on the side of the bed, Samuel’s mind racing headlong through countless possibilities as Penny stared dully into the quiet hall.

* * *

Later that day, as he waited in line for the evening meal, Samuel was still thinking about the scrap of paper with the picture of the bed on it. As was usual on rainy days, the meal hall was packed, since most colonists had nothing better to do when it rained than wait for the next meal. The sky had lightened as the day waned, the rain slackened to a faint drizzle. Samuel moved mechanically through the meal line, his mind occupied by other thoughts. He was a few places from the front when another scrap of paper fluttered to the floor in front of him. He leapt forward, bumped into two other colonists, shoved them aside and snatched the paper off the floor. The other colonists backed away as he wheeled about in search of the person who had dropped this scrap. Blank faces and empty eyes stared back at him. Beyond them, those who had already received their meal floated away. He pushed through the circle of colonists around him, but there was nothing but cream-colored clothing and brown skin in every direction. Blurred figures drifted to and fro, waited in line, sat idly at the tables, the whole hall a shifting mass of greasy putty that slipped through his fingers each time he tried to grasp it.

Samuel felt sick. He slumped to a seat against the wall. The piece of paper in his hands was identical in consistency to the other fragment, thick and rough and relatively sturdy. It was torn on one side and bore a group of pictures drawn in coarse, black markings.

Samuel studied the paper, turning it around in his hands in an attempt to determine the correct orientation, but he could make nothing of it. And whoever had dropped the paper was gone, if indeed someone had dropped it at that moment at all, if it had not been left there hours ago and just then kicked up by some stray breeze.

' ' '

The next morning, Samuel found Penny seated atop a hill, basking in the first rays of sunlight. He pushed the newest fragment of paper in front of her. “Look at this.”

Penny’s face slackened. Her dark eyes flitted between him and the picture.

“What do you think?” he asked. “What is it?”

She held the paper in her hands, turned it around and shook her head despondently. “I don’t know.”

“Please,” he begged, for both their sakes. “Please help me. Look again.”

“I don’t know,” she repeated.

She never apologized, but the fall of her words said it for her. The fleeting hope he had felt just a moment ago withered inside him like a rose petal in winter. Her eyes—big and deep and black as always—stared forlornly into his, and Samuel felt something way down inside himself begin to wither as well. The stomach-sickness again, fainter this time, but isolated in one spot. There was nothing left for him to say. He rose from where he had been crouched at her side with too much effort, as though he had aged considerably in those few moments. He felt his jaw tighten and there was a bitter taste in his mouth. He turned and walked away from her, down the hill, toward the river. He felt her gaze on his back, her silent pleas for his return. But he was beyond supplication then.

He walked along the river and turned the scraps of paper about in his hands, as his thoughts swirled with the soft gurgle of the river water and resonated soundlessly in his mind. He sensed there was some crucial realization he could not quite reach. The words in his head became overwhelming and he struggled to cut his way through them. The stream surged on beside him and the sun climbed overhead and glittered maddeningly in the current. He felt the mud squelch between his toes rooted to the bank. Then he pulled his feet free and dove headlong into the water. He exhaled deeply, blowing out all the air in his lungs into little bubbles that swarmed over his face and led his body up and away. The current dragged him along as he surfaced and floated on his back, and by the time he passed under one of his newly repaired bridges, his mind had cleared once more.

XIII

Samuel sat in the shade of a big tree near the river and stared at the two little scraps of paper in his hands. He had carried them in the pocket of his tunic for the past three days but had made little progress toward unlocking their meaning. It had been another warm day, and even now, late in the afternoon, the heat lingered in the meadow and the air hung thick with drowsy indolence. It was the perfect time to lean against the trunk of a shady tree as Samuel did now, to feel the hard roughness of the bark on his back, the tender kiss of the wind on his cheek, the perfect moment to venture off into dreamland, or just to sit, awake and comfortably sated, to feel the first pleasurable stomach-tremblings that indicated the imminence of dinnertime and the end of another day. It was the perfect time for a story.

The colony had an old tradition of storytelling, perhaps as old as the settlement itself, though no one knew for certain. But for as long as Samuel could remember there had always been a storyteller and there had always been a story. The story was told intermittently, sometimes once a week, sometimes once a month, without any designated time or place. Little by little, a small group would gather in the vicinity of the storyteller. They would sit and wait, and then at a moment of his choosing (the storytellers were almost always older males), he would begin his story.

Today the teller sat in the shade of the next tree over from Samuel. A handful of colonists had already gathered around him, and as the old man spoke, more settled into place at his feet, reverently whispering together, “Thestorythestorythestory…”

Samuel had listened to the storytellers many times before, and once again he felt the old sense of calm evoked by the words tumbling languidly from the teller’s mouth. But it was not until this moment, this telling, that Samuel actually heard the storyteller’s tale. He had listened many times to be sure, and could have recalled those stories immediately after their telling, could have rehashed their basic plots to another colonist in passing. But he had never heard them—a distinction as subtle as being poked by a pin and being pricked, between seeing the skin depressed and then rebounding, and feeling the pin actually pierce the surface, seeing the tiny red droplet slip past the tawny wall and catch on one of the downy hairs. And now, as Samuel listened to and heard this story, he realized with a short shock that was entirely out of tune with the soft heat and the mellow cadence of the teller’s voice that this story was the same story, that each teller had been telling one identical story all along.

It was a strange sensation for Samuel, to hear and remember the story at one and the same time, to have its fabric woven together in déjà entendu in his mind, like a woolen scarf knitted from both ends. The story itself was an old one, perhaps of an ancient world. Samuel recognized many of the words, but certain creatures, objects and relationships were entirely unfamiliar to him.

“Once upon a time,” the storyteller began, “there was a young boy named Sully, who lived with his family in a simple house on a quiet street…”

And the storyteller began to describe the adventures of this young male, Sully, and his “family,” which seemed to be something like a small colony. This family consisted of an adult female (“mother”), an adult male (“father”), the boy Sully and a young female of similar age (Sully’s “sister”), who was called Penny. The story began with a fight between the mother and father, complete with arguing, yelling and the like. Sully and Penny, not knowing the subject of the disagreement, and being too young to understand it anyway, were sent out of the building in which the family lived to play in the meadow of the park nearby.

There they played a game called “hide-and-go-seek,” in which one child concealed himself while the other’s eyes were closed, and then the latter opened her eyes and attempted to find the hider. They had played this game for some time, and it had fallen on Sully to be the seeker. Penny stifled her playful giggles and raced away to hide. Sully closed his eyes and began to count, seated comfortably on the soft grass in the shade of an old oak tree. It was a rather hot mid-afternoon in the park—very much like the climate in the colony at that time—and being rather sleepy from a full lunch, the warm air and the perpetual exercise that comes with being a young and healthy boy at play, when Sully’s eyes fell shut, he soon drifted off to sleep.

As he slept, Sully dreamt he was a much younger child and was sitting on the knee of his grandfather (another male member of the family, but older than the mother and father). His grandfather bounced Sully on his knee for a bit, and the two of them laughed together. Then his grandfather stopped the bouncing and turned Sully around on his knee to face him.

“Sully, my boy,” he said, “you’ve got your whole life ahead of you, and what a life it will be. You will see so many things, things wondrous and frightening to behold. You will see terrible beasts and hear beautiful music. You’ll meet all sorts of people, people who will go out of their way to help you along, and people who will rob you blind just as soon as look at you. You’ll fall in love, and out of love, and back in love again.

“Yes, Sully,” he went on as he leaned back in the chair, “it’s a long road ahead of you, one fraught on both sides with excitement and danger, adventure and boredom, joy and sorrow, peace and suffering. It won’t be easy, but you’ll see it through to the end, you will. And there’s just one thing to remember…”

His grandfather bent forward and whispered in Sully’s ear. “Don’t be afraid, Sully.” He settled back in his chair and went on with a conspiratorial grin and a glazed look in his eyes. “Yes, Sully, don’t be afraid, never fear. The road is long and winding, but you’ll get to the end someday. Yes, my boy, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you, and what a life…”

His voice faded and he craned his head back against the chair and fell asleep. He began to snore quite loudly, his mouth open, the sound reverberating from his throat like rolling thunder.

Then Sully woke up, and the thunder growled in the sky, and the rain began to fall. Fortunately, it was one of those brief and violent summer thunderstorms that shroud the Earth in darkness, with crackling thunder, searing lightning and torrential downpour, and then are gone just a short time later, leaving no sign of their presence. Sully crouched against the big oak tree until the storm cleared and then got up to look for his sister. But Penny was nowhere to be found. He searched all over the meadow for over half an hour before he gave up and decided she had probably just gone home when the rain started. Besides, even though he was quite fond of his sister, Sully relished this newfound independence, the chance to play on his own, to have a real adventure without her getting in the way, as she was often apt to do.

He set out across the park, not knowing or caring where he was headed, forgetting his parents’ argument and his dream and the rainstorm, and enjoying the pleasure of walking through a lovely meadow on a warm summer afternoon without a care in the world. As he passed a row of hedges near one end of the park, a thin and rather mangy-looking dog crawled out of the brush. The dog had only three legs and a melancholy look in its eyes that said it had lived a rather unfortunate life up to this moment. It wagged its tail and stared mournfully at Sully, seemingly divided between an ingrained mistrust of all human beings and a wellspring of hope that this kind and innocent-looking boy might be different.

Like all young boys, Sully loved dogs, and he wasted no time in commencing to pet, scratch and rub the creature in all the ways pleasing to the canine species. The dog rolled onto its back to let Sully rub its belly, and its tail wagged furiously and its tongue dangled from its mouth as it panted gleefully. They went at it for a few minutes, both dog and boy quite enjoying the other’s company, until Sully’s vigorous and playful petting mistakenly rubbed up against a fresh scar buried under the dog’s fur. At once, the dog twisted its body away and snapped at Sully’s hand. Sully jumped up and extracted his fingers from the path of the dog’s vicious fangs, delivering an unintentional kick to the creature’s midsection as he did so. Whatever friendship had momentarily existed between them had been lost, and the dog snapped at Sully again and snarled through bared teeth. Sully took off across the park with the dog just behind him, barking and growling and snapping at his heels as he ran.

Sully was lucky the dog had just three legs, for dogs are considerably faster than young boys, and it was only this handicap that spared Sully some nasty bites. Nevertheless, the dog was scarcely a few steps behind Sully when he reached the street that bounded the park. Seeing a truck with its rear door slightly ajar, Sully leapt inside, slammed the door and slid the latch in place to lock it shut. The dog barked and growled for a moment, then, as if sensing it had chased away a potential friend, began to moan loudly. Sully was just beginning to feel sorry for the poor creature when the truck pulled away and drove down the street.

As the truck moved, some music began to play, an easy and lively melody that jingled and crackled through tinny speakers outside the truck. Sully recognized the tune immediately: it was an ice cream truck! He looked around and discovered he was inside the freezer hold of the truck, surrounded by a bounty of ice cream types and flavors. Marveling at his good fortune, Sully searched through the boxes of treats until he found his favorite: double chocolate caramel swirl. He took two bars, tore off the wrappers and popped one into each corner of his mouth. Presently, the truck came to a stop and Sully heard voices outside. The rear door opened and a pretty young woman stared at him with an expression of surprised amusement. Sully froze, a double chocolate caramel swirl bar in each hand and a considerable amount of chocolate smeared around his lips.

But the woman merely laughed and reached past Sully to grab a box of cherry popsicles. “It looks like we have a stowaway here,” she said. “Why don’t you stay and finish your ice cream while I take care of these customers?”

Sully, his eyes wide and mouth sticky with caramel, could only nod. The woman closed the door most of the way and said, “I’ll be back for you in just a minute.”

Sully’s mind raced. Should he run? Or wait for her to come back? What would she do to him? Call his parents? Or the police? But before he could do anything, even finish his ice cream, she returned. She opened the door and held out her hand to him.

“You better come out of there before you freeze.”

Sully gulped down a bite of chocolate, took her hand and let her help him out of the truck.

“What’s your name, young man?” she asked.

“Sully.”

“Well, Sully, what am I going to do with you?” She eyed the two double chocolate caramel swirl bars in his hands and on his face. “That’s stealing, you know.”

Sully unglued his tongue from the roof of his mouth and began to talk as fast as he could. “Please ma’am, I didn’t mean to get in your truck. There was a dog chasing me and I just jumped inside and all of a sudden we were moving and I didn’t even know…”

She laughed. “All right, all right, Sully. I think we can work something out. I have a few more stops to make today and I could use some help. And since you owe me two ice cream bars…”

“I could be your assistant!”

“That’s right. My name is Lucy. Come sit up front with me. Welcome aboard!”

Sully climbed into the front seat next to Lucy and off they went, cruising down the road, the music playing merrily all the while, calling the children out to buy their treats. They stopped every few blocks, and Lucy stood at the window of the truck and took orders from the long lines of children, while Sully handed her the correct ice cream bar or went around to the back of the truck to get a fresh box.

“Well, Sully,” said Lucy, after they had been driving around for about an hour, “only two more stops left. Have you enjoyed yourself today?”

“Oh yes, ma’am, very much,” Sully answered.

“Good. You don’t have to call me ma’am, you know.”

“Okay.”

“So would you like to help me again tomorrow?”

“I don’t know. On Tuesday my mother always takes us to the market…”

“Oh, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind,” said Lucy. “Besides, didn’t you like helping me? And you can have all the ice cream you want.”

“Yes, ma—Lucy,” Sully said. But he wasn’t sure anymore. He liked to go with his mother and Penny to the market. And Penny—where was she now? He had forgotten all about her ever since he discovered the box of double chocolate caramel swirl bars. He missed her very much, and wondered what had happened to her. Even Lucy’s golden blonde hair and the cheerful music of the truck now reminded him of his sister. And so at the next stop when Lucy asked him to go to the back and fetch a new box of peppermint sandwiches, Sully slipped around to the other side of the truck, ducked into the yard of the nearest house and scurried away. The sweetly enticing music called to him as he went, until he climbed over a fence and scrambled between some bushes, through the yard of the next house and onto the adjacent street.

By now Sully was completely lost. He could not remember at all where they had driven in the ice cream truck after they left the park. Penny and the rest of his family seemed very far away at that moment. He wandered along the sidewalk in search of any familiar landmark until he spotted a group of older boys eyeing him menacingly from the opposite side of the street. Sully looked away and began to walk a bit faster. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the older boys moving in the same direction across the street. Sully quickened his pace again and the boys did the same. He reached a corner and stopped to let a car pass, and the boys crossed over to his side of the road. The car drove by and Sully raced across the street. The boys followed.

“Hey kid!” one of them called. “Don’t be a chicken! We just want to talk to you.”

Sully looked back and saw them grinning fiendishly. They were gaining on him. He darted across the next street and was nearly struck by a passing car. The boys stopped to let the car pass, and Sully ducked into an alleyway. It was a dead end. Sully looked around wildly for any escape. The boys’ pounding footsteps drew nearer. He saw a manhole cut into the pavement, its cover cracked open just a bit, and having no other way out, he climbed in and pulled it shut behind him. He scrambled down the ladder to a narrow ledge next to the splashing, surging sewer water and ran down the tunnel. After a few minutes of hearing only his own footsteps, Sully stopped and looked behind him. The sewer was empty. He was all alone.

Beyond lost, Sully tip-toed along the ledge and searched for any exit. After several minutes, the drainpipe opened into a cavernous hall-like room where water thundered in from all directions. As he tried to discern which of the many tunnels would lead him out of the sewer, Sully glimpsed a faint sparkle in the dim light. He walked toward it and stooped down to find a beautiful gold ring nestled in a corner of the wall and the ledge. It looked strangely familiar. He picked it up and stared at it for a moment, then put it in his pocket. Another glance around him, and he saw a passage that seemed less dark than the others. Having no better point of reference, Sully decided to head in that direction, and within a few moments he glimpsed a faint glow at the end of the tunnel. A few minutes more and he could plainly see that the tunnel opened up into the light. He quickened his steps and soon emerged out of the dark drainpipe and into the sun.

Sully found himself under a footbridge on the narrow shore of a small stream. An incredible thirst overcame him and he knelt and drank from the river. He slapped his hands into the current, splashing water left and right in his joy to be safe and out of the sewer and away from those bullies. Then he walked along the shore until he found a place where he could climb up the rather steep bank, up to the level of the footbridge. When he reached the top, he gazed around him in amazement. He was at the far end of the park, the very park where he had fallen asleep hours ago while playing hide-and-go-seek with Penny. He could be home in fifteen minutes! He began to walk quickly across the grassy meadow, his heart light with the knowledge that he had finally come to the end of his journey. He was halfway through the park when he spotted a dark-haired girl about Penny’s age pacing around the meadow, her eyes fixed to the ground as she stooped to look under bushes and behind trees.

Sully approached her and asked, “Are you looking for something?”

The girl appeared startled at first, having been so focused on her search, but then replied, “Oh, yes. I am looking for my doll. I put it down while I went to get a drink of water, and when I came back it was gone. Will you help me find it?”

Sully agreed, and the two of them walked together through the park in search of the doll. After some time, Sully turned to the girl, whose name was Callie, and said, “I don’t think we will find your doll today.”

Callie’s face fell. “Yes, you’re right,” she conceded resignedly. “Well, thank you for your help anyway.”

“You’re welcome,” Sully replied. “But since you lost your doll, maybe we can play something else.”

“Yes, let’s,” she said eagerly, tucking brown-black hair behind her ears. “Can we play hide-and-go-seek?”

Sully frowned. “Let’s play something else. I have had enough of hide-and-go-seek today.”

And so they did play something else. They skipped rope, played cat’s cradle, hopscotch, jacks and more. Although he did not realize it, Callie reminded Sully very much of Penny, and was almost as good a playmate as she. But they were having such a good time together that Sully forgot all about his long journey and his lost sister. Yet when the sky began to turn orange and gray as the sun dipped behind the trees, Sully remembered he missed Penny and wanted to go home. But Callie would not let him leave.

“Stay just a bit longer,” she implored him. “The sun isn’t even down yet.”

“I’m sorry, but I lost my sister earlier today and I want to go home to make sure she is all right.”

“I’m sure she is,” said Callie. “She is probably at home with your mother and father right now. But won’t you stay and play just a little while longer? I have no brothers or sisters and I will be very lonely if you leave.”

“Then let’s play tomorrow.”

This suggestion seemed to comfort Callie, and she reluctantly agreed. “All right. I will see you tomorrow, then. I am looking forward to it already.”

“Goodbye,” said Sully. “See you tomorrow.” And off he went across the meadow, walking quite fast despite being very tired from his long day, so anxious was he to return home at last.

Soon he had made his way through the park. There was his house, just across the street. He went up the steps and opened the door. His mother heard him enter and rushed into the front room.

“Sullivan Tesla Reid!” she yelled. “Where on Earth have you been? And look at you: you’ve torn your shirt and your clothes are filthy. Take them off and get in the bath right now. We’ve been worried sick about you.”

“Yes, Mom.”

Sully slunk to the flight of stairs opposite the sitting room, where Penny lay on the floor drawing a picture with crayons on a piece of paper.

“Hi Penny,” he said, cheered once more at seeing her. She did not look at him. “Where did you go? I looked for you after the rain, but I couldn’t find you anywhere.”

Now she turned to glare at him accusingly. “I didn’t go anywhere, Sully. I waited forever for you to find me, and then it started raining so I just stayed in my hiding spot until it stopped. Then I came out and you were gone. So where did you go?”

Sully blushed. “I did look for you, Penny. But then I found a dog that wanted to play, but it got mean and chased me, and I escaped in an ice cream truck, and the driver let me help her, and then I was chased by some bullies, but I got away in the sewer, and—”

“Yeah, right. Go take a bath. You stink.”

“No, I really did do—never mind. I’m sorry Penny.”

Penny turned around and went back to her drawing. Sully waited a moment and then walked upstairs to the bathroom. As he began to undress he put his hand into his pocket and felt the ring he had found earlier. He took it out and put it on the counter while he used the toilet and had a bath, then took it with him to his bedroom. He was pulling on his clothes when his mother knocked on his door.

“Your dinner is on the kitchen table,” she said. “Go eat and then come right back up here and get into bed.”

Sully got dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen. He set the ring on the table while he ate his meal. His mother washed the dishes in silence. When she was finished, she turned around to face him. Her face had softened a bit and there were little lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth.

“Where were you all this time, Sully?” she asked. “Penny couldn’t find you anywhere.”

“I looked for her Mom, but then I was chased by a dog and some bullies, and I escaped into the sewer and found this ring…” He held it up to show her.

His mother glanced at the ring and her mouth opened wide. She moved to the table for a closer look and fell into a chair, as though her legs could no longer hold her. She took the ring from Sully, turned it over in her hands and stared at it in astonishment.

“My God,” she whispered. “Where did you find this?”

“In the sewer, Mom.”

“Sully, this is your father’s wedding ring. He lost it this morning and I was so mad at him…” A tear slipped out of her eye. “Larry!” she called. “Larry, come in here!”

Sully’s father entered the kitchen carefully.

“What is it, Clea?” he asked, then noticed Sully sitting at the table. “Well, well. The little runaway returns. Did you have a nice time, leaving your sister all alone in the park?”

“Larry, look.” Sully’s mother extended the ring.

Sully’s father glanced at it distractedly, looked at Sully, then quickly looked back at the ring. He studied it in similar amazement.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said as he sat down. “My ring. Where did you find it, Clea?”

“Sully found it,” she replied.

“Sully?” He looked at his son. “But how? Where?”

“I found it in the sewer, Dad.”

“The sewer? But what were you—the sewer! I must have knocked it down the drain when I washed up this morning. I can’t believe it.”

Hearing the commotion, Penny entered the room. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“Your brother just found your father’s wedding ring,” Sully’s mother said. “I thought he’d lost it.”

“I did lose it,” Larry replied. “I’m just lucky our little hero here found it. Thanks, son.” He squeezed Sully’s shoulder and ruffled his hair, then kissed Clea. Sully looked at Penny and she beamed back at him, and he was very glad to be home again.

The story came to an end just as the sun began to set and the sky turned a beautiful pink and orange in the fading light of the meadow. The sound of bells rolled across the colony. The colonists were in good spirits once more. Gleeful cries of “ontbe chick!” and “ullvan tesree!” rang out as they meandered off toward the meal halls. Samuel remained seated for a moment and let the story tumble through his mind, hearing the words both strange and familiar, and finally understanding this one small thing he had so long taken for granted. Then he stood as well and set off for the nearest meal hall.

* * *

The commotion had already begun by the time Samuel arrived at the hall. A few minutes earlier, the first colonist in the meal line had stepped forward to the hole in the building’s far wall. The small red light above the hole flashed once, there was the usual clicking and whirring sound and a meal cake appeared in the hole. The colonist, an adult male, took the cake and stood in place and stared at it for a moment. An older female nudged by him to the front of the line. There was something different about the male’s food, but he couldn’t quite say what it was. Then the female received her meal. The male stared at her cake as she turned toward him. It was at least twice as large as his. She slipped past him and scurried from the hall as his eyes bore a hole in her back. A younger male stepped forward and received a meal cake even larger than the female’s. Then another adult male received his cake; it was not as large as the female’s but still considerably bigger than the first male’s. A wide grin spread across his face at the first good thing that had happened to him in a long time.

The colony had long been simmering in the wake of the recent incidents, but now the situation had reached its boiling point and long-repressed emotions began to bubble over. The first male took in the other’s self-satisfied smirk and the size of his meal in one glance. A low, guttural, savage growl escaped his lips. He dropped his cake to the floor. His legs flexed.

Samuel entered the hall to the sounds of astonished screams. The first male had just launched himself at the second and grabbed at his meal cake. The latter, who had not even noticed his disgruntled neighbor until that moment, was shocked to find his meal knocked from his hand and sent tumbling to the floor, followed hungrily by the first male. But he did not hesitate to react. In an instant, the second male dove on top of the first and the two men clawed at each other’s face and scrabbled for the fallen cake. The other colonists screamed and backed away. A young adult female was next in line; she received an undersized portion as well. Seeing the much larger cake on the floor between the two brawling males, she made a dive for it. And at that moment, just as Samuel walked through the door, the meal hall descended into chaos.

XIV

As it turned out, the same malfunction had occurred at the other six meal halls that evening. Similar skirmishes broke out across the colony. One by one, each colonist approached the food machine hesitantly, not knowing what his fate would be. Each hoped to receive a large meal cake, but all who did feared reprisals from colonists who had not been so fortunate. No single cake was normal sized. Those who received bigger meals shielded their prizes and scuttled quickly from the hall. Some who received smaller cakes waited near the food hole and ambushed those who received larger portions. Others merely bowed their heads, walked away and ate their tiny cakes alone, too worn down to fight.

Samuel received a larger meal cake. He was a bit surprised by his good fortune, but he took his food and strode calmly from the hall. A group of less fortunate colonists eyed him warily. He passed them without a word, neither avoiding their gazes nor staring back at them. They watched him go and waited for what appeared to be easier prey. Outside the hall, Samuel spotted Penny seated under a tree nearby holding a small, untouched meal cake. He hesitated as he neared her, feeling for the first time the weight of the food cradled in his hands. Penny turned her head up to Samuel, her lips drawn wide and flat to create little hollows in her narrow cheeks. She fingered her meal cake reflexively but only picked at it in her lap. Samuel broke off a piece of his food and extended it to her. She stared at the piece of cake, then at him, not seeming to comprehend this act of selfless generosity, perhaps the first she had ever witnessed. Slowly, she extended her hand and took it.

“Thank you.”

Samuel nodded graciously and sat down next to her. They both held equal portions about the same size as a normal meal cake, and they ate together as the cool breeze swelled to a wind and brought an end to the day’s warmth. The sun seemed to set more quickly than usual, leaving bruised streaks of indigo and violet in the tired sky.

* * *

The problem with the meal cakes continued. The clashes between colonists intensified. Informal marauding bands of colonists who received undersized cakes assembled outside the halls to wait for particularly weak-looking victims with large meal cakes. But even these groups shared no real unity, for as soon as they had bullied a meal cake out of the hands of a more fortunate colonist, they would set upon one another, each trying to claim his ill-gotten gain for himself.

The morning after the first incident with the meal cakes, a female colonist lost three teeth when attacked by two younger males with smaller portions. At the midday meal, an older male’s arm was broken as he tried to fend off another assailant. Where once the sound of the bells had prompted an immediate colony-wide migration to the meal halls, now the colonists feared to even set foot inside those doors. Some loitered near the halls all day, waiting for the bells to toll so they could rush inside, grab their meal cake, and either escape before there were too many looters or join those same looters and wait in ambush for a potential victim. Many of the older colonists who required less sustenance stayed clear of the halls until long after the bells had sounded, hoping to avoid the violent clashes altogether.

Samuel alone remained unscathed by these circumstances, even though he continued to receive a large cake at every meal. A powerful aura existed around him; he never imagined another person would harm him, and no one did. Everything about him, his words, the strange things he did around the colony, even the way he walked, marked him as somehow different from the other colonists, somehow untouchable. After the first evening, he and Penny began to visit the meal halls together with the tacit understanding that they would divide their two cakes evenly between them. But by the midday meal on the second day of the crisis, Samuel realized it was always he who had the bigger cake, always he who shared his meal, and always Penny who received a small cake and accepted his offering. He began to suspect each individual colonist received rations of a constant size, and he wondered if there might be a way to encourage them to share their meals as well.

As the sun set that evening, Samuel waited inside one of the meal halls. When the bells sounded, he was first to receive his meal cake. Once again, it was larger than average. The next colonist in line, a young male, received a small cake for the fourth straight meal. He hesitated a moment, as if unsure whether to wait and attempt to ambush another colonist, or eat his food, go to bed with an unfilled stomach and hope his fortunes would improve the next day. He bowed his head and trudged toward Samuel, who stood near front of the line. As he approached, Samuel broke off a piece of his own cake and extended it to the other colonist. The youth did not see it until he had nearly walked into Samuel’s arm. He stopped and stared at the offering for a moment, then looked up at Samuel, his face stone-blank, mouth slightly agape. He searched Samuel’s face with flat and barren eyes, then snatched the morsel from Samuel’s hand and fled from the hall as though he had just stolen it.

An adult male stepped forward next and received a small meal cake. His shoulders sank and his head dropped. He shuffled about in haphazard circles that edged him to a spot near Samuel, close enough to observe the front of the line, but far enough that he was not so terribly affected by Samuel’s presence. The adult female behind him accepted a large meal cake. The tension in her body relaxed momentarily in recognition of her good luck in receiving this gift before a sizeable group of less fortunate colonists had amassed. But then she raised her guard once more and scurried away from the front of the line. She had only taken a few steps when she drew to a stop in front of Samuel, as if caught by some powerful magnetic force. She looked at Samuel, enfolding her food protectively in her arms. His dark eyes glinted sharply as they stared back at hers, and she turned her gaze to the other male. Slowly, very slowly, she pulled out her meal cake. Slowly, hesitantly, she broke off a piece and extended it toward him. The hall was silent. Everyone in the line had turned to watch this exchange. The male reached out, took the proffered food and clutched it to his chest. A murmur went up among the other colonists in line. The male rushed from the hall while his female benefactor slunk out behind him.

Only once the piece of meal cake had exchanged hands without incident did Samuel dare to exhale completely. For the first time since he had stepped forward to unlock the sleeping hall doors, the critical decision and action had rested in the hands of another. But it had worked, at least this time. Samuel oversaw the rest of the meal distribution process at the hall that evening. For the most part, the colonists robotically imitated the chain of generous gestures that had started with Samuel. A few colonists who received larger meals rushed from the hall as soon as they collected their prize, leaving some with smaller than average portions at the end of the process. They milled about the hole in the wall after the other colonists had gone, and Samuel broke his cake into small pieces and distributed it among the group. By the time he was done, Samuel had only a single bite left to himself. Still, he was pleased with the success of his impromptu experiment.

He repeated his demonstration the next morning with similar results. And again he left only a small morsel of cake for his own meal. He thought he recognized a few colonists from the previous evening’s meal, and he noticed they received the same sized cakes as on the earlier occasion. Somehow this piece of information seemed especially crucial to Samuel, though he could not say why. Yet despite the encouraging results of his initial plan, he knew it could not serve as a long-term answer. He could not be at every meal hall at the same time, and a single action at one of the seven meal halls could not alter the ever-more primitive tendencies of all the colonists. A surer solution would have to be found.

XV

Within 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

Samuel 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.

XVII

Samuel pulled the five scraps of paper from his pocket and sorted through them until he found the one he wanted. He turned the picture in his hands to find the proper orientation, knelt next to the colonist lying still and lifeless on the ground and compared the man’s face to the image on the lower right side of the paper.

The expression was the same: the circular, hairless head, the eyes that popped from their sockets and stared blankly into nothingness, the lips pinched together and turned down at the edges with a thin trail of spittle running down from the left side of the man’s mouth. And the wavy lines next to the face in the picture unmistakably represented the river. The two circular shapes above them remained a mystery, but Samuel had no doubts about the meaning of the lower images. The river, or something in the water of the river, had caused this man to collapse, had caused his face to look this way. Before Samuel had found this scrap of paper—what was it, two days ago now?—he had never seen anything like this happen to anyone in the colony. So whoever had made this picture knew what was going to happen to the river before it even happened.

Samuel sat down hard. He stared at the man’s lifeless face, then out at the river. The sluggish, blue-gray blur of the current muddled against the still, green backdrop, the colors rubbing together like layers of crayon in a child’s drawing. His mind shut down. All conscious thoughts ceased, all except for one that played on over and over again, an eternal heartbeat in a desolate, gray wasteland. Someone knew. Someone knew. Someone knew.

Then his mind began to slowly reawaken, and the other thoughts came back to him one by one. But how could they know, how could they… unless… unless… unless the person who had made this picture had also done this thing to the river, the thing that made this man frown and shoot out his tongue, made his knees wobble as he began to stand, made his eyes widen and roll back in his head as he fell to the ground? Someone had done this thing to the river.

Samuel turned back to the colonist lying beside him. He had never seen a dead person before, much less seen anyone actually die, for the people of the colony died peacefully in their sleep at a predetermined age and were rolled into the sleeping hall floor when the beds were turned to be cleaned. As far as he could tell, the man had merely fallen into a deep, deep slumber from which he could not be roused. But Samuel knew, somehow, that his state was not a good one, was not at all desirable, was something to be avoided. The expression fixed on the man’s face tied Samuel’s innards in knots, yet he could not look away. It was the same expression that swept across his features as he fell, a look of ultimate pain and surprise, nothing like the blissful repose Samuel had noticed on the faces of colonists asleep in their beds. Something was very, very wrong, and it must be rectified as soon as possible. That one of the scraps of paper had specifically referenced this very incident made Samuel all the more uneasy.

Beside him, the river rolled on, smooth and steady as ever. Samuel had waded in its calm current just moments earlier. Yet something in the water had killed the colonist lying at his feet. If that something had been placed in the river itself, then it would wash away with the current in time and the water would be safe enough to drink. But when? And how would he know? Samuel did not dare drink from the river himself. He must assume the thing in the water was still there, find it and remove it. He walked briskly upstream along the river bank. Two more colonists lay motionless on the grass. He looked away and went on. In a few minutes he reached the point where the river escaped under the fence and away into the meadow beyond the colony. Another picture was caught in the junction between two fence posts.

Samuel recognized the circular image from the drawing of the poisoned river water. But he had no time for these pictures now. He knew he could not prevent the entire colony from drinking from the stream. He must do something at once, before too many colonists even had the chance to approach the river. He rested his arms on the upper cross pole of the fence and forced himself to think. Nothing came to him. His pulse throbbed in his head and echoed with the dull tick-tock of dampened bells. He stared down at the river where it surged under the fence. He was afraid to look behind him to see if more colonists had fallen along its banks. He must think. He must act. He must do something, anything. But still nothing came to him, only his own silent, rhythmic prodding. Think… think… think…

For the first time in many weeks, Samuel did not know what to do. Before this moment, he had scarcely needed the help of another person. Now there was no one who could help him. His breaths came short and hard, as though he had just sprinted from one meal hall to the next. Little trickles of moisture began to run down his brow. But still his mind remained blank. He closed his eyes, and his thoughts grew even more empty. He felt his skull attempting to burst out of his skin. He tried to slow his breathing. He could control that. With his eyes closed, it became easier to block out everything else. Soon even the sound of the rushing river water faded from his thoughts. He focused on the air flowing in and out of his chest. Breathe. In. Out. Slow. In. Out. In. Out. He opened his eyes and looked out to where the river ran down from the windswept mountains in the distance. It was a strangely peaceful sight, so long as he ignored the thought of the invisible toxin that coursed through the bloodstream of the colony. His breaths grew calm. In. Out. In. Out. His vision refocused and the river and the meadow beyond the fence came back sharp and clear.

About twenty meters outside the fence line, he could just make out a thin black tube that ran up to the river and dipped down into the dancing current. Samuel hoisted himself up to the top of the fence. He had one leg over the upper cross pole when he stopped. He had never passed beyond the fence line before. As far as he knew, no one in the colony had. Even after he had removed dozens of poles from the fence, he had never strayed beyond the imaginary line that extended between support posts. He started to swing his leg back to the colony’s side of the fence when he realized he had no choice. He must investigate that tube.

Samuel tightened his grip on the fence and hoisted his other leg over the pole. He was outside the fence now, outside the colony. He hurried to where the tube ran deep into the river and yanked it from the water. A viscous brown liquid leaked out one drop at a time. Samuel followed the tube away from the river, holding the dripping end aloft to halt the flow of the liquid. The black tube snaked across the meadow with no end in sight. Samuel pointed the hose away from him and the brown liquid continued to stain the grass at his feet. He took the tube in both hands and bent it in half. The flow stopped. He unbent the tube and wound it up again, cinching it together in a simple knot. Then he used the window latch to dig a shallow hole in the ground, placed the knotted end of the tube inside and buried it.

When he was done, he stood up and gazed around. The meadow was empty. It looked identical to the meadow of the colony, but without the swarms of people. He skimmed his feet over the ground. The grass here felt rougher, the blades broader and sharper beneath his toes. The mountains surged upward in defiant challenge to the flat, green valley, and the late-afternoon shadows rippled over the flanks of the peaks to make them appear alive and muscled, crouched and waiting at the edge of the plain. Samuel felt himself longing to stay, to be completely alone for just a little while. But he knew he had to check on the river. He forced himself to turn back toward the fence and return to the colony.

As he swung over the cross pole, a colonist approached the river in the distance, moving with an unmistakable, light, careless gait. The figure did not scurry across the meadow but walked more upright, more relaxed, than the other colonists. It walked like Penny. In an instant, Samuel had leapt down from the fence and was running along the river, yelling as he ran.

Penny heard Samuel’s cries as he sprinted after her, and she waved in his direction and continued toward the river, gesturing for him to follow. He raced on headlong. Fear crept over her face as he closed in, but she drifted ever closer to the water. Samuel’s legs churned madly. For a moment he thought she might run, might make for the stream. He drove himself forward. Then he was on her, grabbing her around the waist and dragging her to the ground as a breathless shriek caught in her chest.

Samuel tried to explain. “The river… you can’t drink it… not yet…”

But as he held her to the ground, he saw another colonist kneel on the bank farther downstream and stoop forward to cup some water between his hands and raise it to his mouth. Samuel leapt to his feet and was about to call out a warning when he realized he needed to know if the river water was safe. By then it was too late. The colonist dipped his head forward and drank. Samuel waited, his head thumping. But the colonist stood and walked away without distress. Samuel slumped against Penny in relief as she fluttered beneath him, then he recovered himself and helped her to her feet.

“What is it?” she asked. “What is happening?”

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s nothing. Let us go and take a drink.”

They walked side by side to the river, knelt along the bank and dipped their hands into the cool rushing water. Samuel raised his hands first, paused a moment, then sipped the liquid from his palms. It tasted cold and fresh and wonderful. Penny drank, then stooped to fill her hands a second time, and Samuel quickly splashed another handful of water into his mouth. Penny sucked up her second palmful in one long, slow slurp, and Samuel felt the frantic rhythms of his body subside as she gazed at him over fingers cupped against her lips. He smiled at her and slid to his knees for one more drink.

XVIII

As the sun rose and the sky leaked blood-red the morning after the deaths at the river, Samuel removed another two dozen poles from the fence. Using the sheets from two beds, he lashed together six rafts, one for each colonist who had died, loaded each body onto a raft and pushed them into the middle of the river. The current carried them down to the edge of the colony, under the fence and away, across the outer meadow. Then he returned to his work at the meal halls, which he had neglected the previous evening. The boxes were full to the brim, and Samuel gave everyone double their normal ration to compensate for his absence.

The next day, Samuel finished his repairs on the remaining two collapsed bridges. When he had tied on the final piece of wood, Samuel waded out of the water and lay on the river bank, basking in the sun. He breathed easy now, felt his arms unclench and his fingers peel open. He knew he had just averted a major disaster two days before. Yet he had been up to the challenge once again. And now the bridges he had so long neglected were finally complete. He closed his eyes against the bright sunlight and stretched his limbs as far as they would go, spreading himself out on the soft grass and feeling with self-satisfied pleasure the lean tautness of the muscles in his narrow arms and legs, their every movement, contraction and relaxation a physical extension of the will of his mind.

He rolled onto his stomach, dug the six pieces of paper out of his pocket and laid them out on the ground in front of him. He had partially deciphered one of them already, the one indicating the crisis with the river water. Perhaps all of them were somehow related to the recent incidents in the colony. He picked up the drawing of the bed. This one might have something to do with the sleeping halls, but there was no other image on the scrap besides the bed. Samuel sorted through the other fragments and found one whose torn edges fit those of the bed image.

But even joining these pieces left a tear on one side of the combined picture. And the previous problem with the sleeping halls had nothing to do with people lying in beds; rather, the locked doors prevented the colonists from even reaching their beds. Samuel scanned the pictures once more and found one with a rectangular drawing on it. When he turned the torn edge to the right, it clearly resembled a door.

But the ripped edges did not line up with the person-bed picture, nor with any of the other drawings.

Samuel considered the remaining three pictures. Each showed one or more circular images with lines extending outward from the edges. The one that depicted the poisoned river water he understood. He studied the other two pictures, and one of them immediately became clear.

Two circles, one larger than the other. Two pointed lines between them about to stab into each other. How could he ignore the significance of this image after so much time spent dealing with circular meal cakes of different sizes, with colonists attacking one another over these inequalities?

Samuel grabbed the river image and held the two drawings together in his hands. There could be no doubt now. Someone knew. Someone knew about these disasters before they occurred. Someone had made these pictures and left them throughout the colony, and then the incidents had happened just as the pictures indicated. Because the same person who drew these pictures had poisoned the river and locked the sleeping halls and changed the sizes of the meal cakes and…The colony was under attack. Samuel could not imagine why, but it was. It had been for days and days and days, all the way back to the First Hero and the broken food machines. And then she had disappeared. All the heroes had disappeared. Samuel had never known true malice before, but he sensed it now behind these attacks. And even as he groped for answers, there was a part of him that was afraid.

But above the fear, he felt the relentless urgency that dragged his heart on at breakneck speed, the poor, valiant thing thup-thup-thupping dreadfully as it struggled to catch up. The meal cakes, the river—the attacks were getting worse. Samuel focused on the drawings. The answers must be in the drawings. He could not believe otherwise. But he did not know what to make of them. They seemed incomplete, yet he knew he could not merely wait to find the right pictures to complete them. The next attack could come at any moment. Samuel gathered the pictures to his chest and lay back in the grass. The morning chill had worn off and he felt the sun’s heat full on his face. Through his half-opened eyelids, its rays shimmered in blurry, soft lines of light that quivered as the wind fluttered through his eyelashes. His vision throbbed and whitened, but he forced his eyes open until the light washed away the sky and the clouds and the trees overhead. He closed them and the imprint of the sun remained on the backs of his eyelids, little, hazy stars floating outward from the edges of the faint orange sphere. He watched them trickle off into darkness while the bright orb at the center pulsed out an endless trail of the flickering beacons.

His eyes snapped open. He shuffled through the pictures until he found the three with the mysterious circular symbols, held them up to the sky and looked at them through squinted eyes. They were suns. Samuel turned to the scrap of paper with the two suns, the river and the face. He recalled finding it the first time he had distributed meal cakes from his handmade box. The next day, he installed the other two food boxes, worked three meal halls at the evening meal and had grown so disgusted at dealing with the other colonists that he slept outside by the fence. He awoke from his nightmare before dawn with an idea for repairing the bridges. He had worked through the rest of the night and continued into the next day. He had completed his repairs on the first bridge that day and was in the middle of the second bridge when he saw the male colonist drink from the river and collapse on the spot.

Two suns. Two days. Two days had passed from the time he found the scrap of paper predicting the poisoned river to the actual incident. Samuel looked at the paper with the different-sized meal cakes. Three suns. He could not recall the exact amount of time between his finding the paper and the malfunction with the meal cakes, but three days seemed about right. So not only had someone known about these attacks beforehand, that same someone had planned and executed them on a precise day. On these papers, in these actions, Samuel had encountered a villainous mind far superior to any other in the colony, a mind well beyond even his own. In the other colonists, he faced a collective instinct with no more rational capabilities than a herd of cattle. But this new mind was that of a hunter, cold and systematic and calculating. Yet however ignorant they might be, the colonists did not deserve to be terrorized this way. Samuel sensed this fact at once. But they would not protect themselves.

Each day Samuel drew closer to his shadowy foe. Yet he knew he might wake tomorrow to find that a new disaster had occurred overnight. And then Samuel realized how this someone had caused these catastrophes without any witnesses. He had worked in the darkness, while the whole colony lay curled up in bed. And so to catch this person, to break the secret, he too would have to work at night, standing guard over the darkened meadow while all the other colonists were helplessly asleep.

* * *

When the sun set that evening, Samuel began his new task. Within a few hours the moon rose pale blue and a sliver shy of full against the violet sky. Samuel walked the colony, traversing different paths across the meadow, the constant motion keeping his mind awake and alert. But nothing stirred in the colony that night, save for the grass and the leaves in the cool night breeze and the shimmering moonlight in the slowly churning river. When the sun rose, Samuel worked his three food halls, asked Penny to wake him in time for the midday meal and fell into bed in an empty sleeping hall.

When he explained to her that he had been awake all night, she offered at once to join him the next night, though he was not sure she fully grasped his reasons. Thereafter, she became his companion every night. In early evenings, when they both were not yet tired, they would walk together, sometimes talking, sometimes not. As the night wore on, they slept in shifts, waking each other every few hours. Samuel allowed Penny to sleep longer than he did, and slept fitfully during her turns on watch, for fear she would either fail to notice something amiss or be unable to wake him in time to stop it.

On the third night, when the moon had just risen and the other people of the colony had settled into their beds, Samuel and Penny were walking along the edge of the colony when Samuel paused for a moment to look out at the wide, empty meadow beyond the fence. The moon was full now and cast the land in a pale silver light, illuminating a vast, lonely space, seemingly so far from the colony, though it lay just beyond the fence, mere steps away. He thought he had only stopped for an instant, but it must have been longer than that, for he felt Penny’s arm encircle his, saw her head turned up to him with a worried look on her face, heard her ask “What is it?” in the distant, muffled voice of one speaking underwater.

He could not take his eyes off the steely meadow. The dark mountains came alive in the moonlight, layered and jagged like uncut gems. “Did you even wonder…” he began, then stopped.

Her frown intensified. “Come.”

She tugged gently but firmly at the sleeve of his tunic. He looked at her, at her wide, glossy eyes and creased brow, then back at the meadow. He could have stayed there all night, let his mind wander out across the open plain. But he had no good reason for doing so, and at last he turned to follow her. They walked on in silence until they moved away from the fence line and neared the center of the colony.

“Why did you stop?” Penny asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “It was just so… beautiful… Do you ever think about what might be out there? Outside the fence?”

She stopped and stared at him with narrowed eyes. “I can see what is out there,” she said. “Grass and more grass, all the way to the mountains. It’s the same as it is here.”

“But then why is the fence there?”

She did not seem to understand.

“I mean, if things are the same outside the fence as they are inside, then why is the fence there at all?”

She began to walk again. He followed, waiting for her response.

After a moment, she answered grudgingly, “Whoever built it must have had a good reason.”

“But what is it? Don’t you want to know?”

“No. I never thought about it. It doesn’t matter. What if there is something bad out there?”

“There could be. But what if there’s something good?”

She hesitated. The moonlight shimmered in her eyes and made them all the more dark and empty for that glimmering, silver sparkle. She was about to answer when Samuel quieted her with a quick hiss and a hand over her lips. She started, but he rested his other hand on her back reassuringly and removed his grip from her mouth to point across the colony toward one of the meal halls. There, next to the low-lying building abutting the hall, a pair of pale shadows flitted about in the faint light.

“Who are they?” she whispered.

But he hushed her with a wave of his hand and was gone, scuttling across the meadow toward the distant figures, stooped low to the ground as he darted from tree to hill, doing his best to go unnoticed. She followed him, less gracefully and rather less quietly. Yet their efforts at stealth were in vain, as all at once the figures turned and seemed to glimpse Samuel’s approaching form. In a flash they were gone, racing headlong across the meadow. Samuel stopped for a moment and marveled at their grace, the raw, smooth motions of their bodies as they ran, the sharp edges of their limbs as they sliced through the dark sky and flashed dimly in the moonlight. Then he took off after them, his strides somehow just a bit less refined.

The two darkened figures reached the fence, and each of them vaulted it in one smooth motion from an all-out sprint, placing a hand deftly on the uppermost cross pole as they leaned sideways to swing their legs over, then landing softly on the other side and rebounding instantly into a new stride. Samuel vaulted the fence nearly as well, but it was clear that he could not gain on them. Almost as soon as he landed, the figures split up abruptly and raced off across the meadow in different directions.

Samuel knew the chase was over. He slowed to a stop and stared after the figures as they fled across the wide-open meadow. In a minute they were gone, lost in the darkness and the shadow of the mountains, but in that instant Samuel knew with absolute certainty that these shadowy figures were the foes he had sought these past weeks. They were responsible for the attacks on the colony. They were responsible for the drawings he had discovered. And as Samuel recalled the way they split off so suddenly in a burst of perfect synchronicity that recalled the same degree of order and detail in the pictures on the little scraps of paper, he guessed that these drawings were not merely portents of barbarous things to come, but a carefully devised system of messages by which these people communicated their plans to one another. And now it fell to Samuel to decipher their messages and stop their attacks before further damage was done.

XIX

From that night on, Samuel and Penny focused their vigils on the colony’s seven meal halls. They patrolled the meadow under darkness, rarely sleeping at all now, and remained awake through the morning meal to distribute cakes at the three halls. Then they fell asleep in a vacant sleeping hall or the shadiest spot in the meadow. They awoke again for the midday meal (Samuel oftentimes rising from a restless sleep even before the sound of the bells), slept through the afternoon, awoke for the evening meal and waited for the sun to set before they began their nighttime rounds once more.

Two uneventful days passed after Samuel and Penny sighted the shadowy figures lurking around the meal hall. On the second evening they distributed meal cakes together at the three halls. They had further developed their complementary working rhythm in the past few days, one bending to remove a cake while the other passed one out, each setting aside broken-off portions to be combined with others to make whole cakes, each of them silently attuned to the actions of the other. Together they had managed to cut the time required for the entire process nearly in half.

When their work was done, they exited the hall together, their own cakes in hand. A white rain fell from a slate gray sky. On some unspoken signal they began to run, racing across the meadow toward the nearest sleeping hall for a brief rest before their long nighttime vigil, their bare feet skimming over the slick matted grass, eager to be free of their burden once more, if only until the next day. Dampened colonists coagulated around the hall door ahead of them, and they slid to a stop and gulped greedily at the sweet, wet air.

“Look!” Penny grabbed Samuel’s arm and pointed into the crowd.

Before Samuel had a chance to pick out anything, she darted toward the sleeping hall door, snaking through the funneled queues of putty-colored flesh. He lost her for a moment as she stooped to the ground and he stumbled forward numbly. Then her arm shot out of the crowd and her bright face bobbed above bare heads and her crystal teeth flashed in excitement as she jumped up and down to find him. She wove her way back against the current, waving aloft another scrap of paper.

Samuel did not wait for Penny to reach him. He raced past her to the hall, careening through the crowd and into the doorway. The colonists entering the hall filtered throughout the room and mingled instantly with the others inside, like molecules of gas dispersing into empty space. Samuel stopped inside the door, unsure of whom to chase. Colonists shuffled about all around him, their shoulders stooped and heads bowed. He leapt after the nearest one, an elderly male. The man made a half-hearted attempt to scurry away but Samuel was on him in an instant, seizing him by the cloth of his tunic and spitting out a flurry of questions.

“Who are you? Where do you come from? Why—”

The man stared back at Samuel, eyes wide and mouth quivering. His knees buckled, and Samuel felt the man’s entire weight supported in his arms. His voice trailed off and he let the man go. He slumped heavily to the ground, his rear end striking the floor first, his limbs falling limply about him to thunk against the hard floor.

Samuel stood over the man, not even seeing him. Around him, the other colonists had scattered into corners and behind beds. All eyes rested on him. A few tears seeped onto the cheeks of the man at his feet. Samuel left him splayed on the ground and walked back to the entrance of the hall. Penny held out the drawing she had recovered. It was another person.

Samuel fished the other scraps from his pocket. He had found a similar picture already. And as he held them in his hands, he was able to piece together these two images, along with the drawing of the bed, to form a complete picture.

Yet even this whole drawing remained meaningless. A person in a bed and a person standing next to it. One with a large head and one with an arrow pointing at his. But no indication of any forthcoming attack, other than a vague reference to the sleeping halls. Penny had nothing to offer either. Samuel was exhausted. He tucked the papers back in his pocket and stepped out into the twilit meadow. The rain had slowed to a soft mist that coated his face in tiny sparkling droplets. A few hours remained before darkness fell and he knew he needed to sleep. The other colonists had already turned their backs on them as they reentered. They napped or chattered to no one in particular or played silly, apathetic games under their bedsheets. Samuel fell into bed in a vacant row, Penny in the bed beside him. He would have plenty of time to ponder his latest discovery during the long night.

* * *

They slept a few hours and woke again as the sun set and the rain ceased. When darkness fell, they began their vigil. Samuel studied the papers intermittently by the light of the waning moon, his ears always pricked up, eyes searching the meadow at every hint of sound or motion. But it was an uneventful night without even the slightest sign of anything amiss in the colony. And still Samuel made no headway on the mysterious drawings. At daybreak they rested again and waited for the morning meal. They passed out meal cakes and ate their own and fell asleep out by the fence line. About an hour later they were awakened by the sound of distant screams.

XX

Samuel awoke with a start, shook groggy sleep from his head and raced off in the direction of the screams. Penny became tangled in her bedsheets in her haste, but she unraveled herself and followed as fast as she could. As he approached the nearest meal hall, the point from which the cries seemed to emanate, Samuel slowed to a stop, stunned into stillness by what he saw before him. All around the meal hall, a group of strange, large brown creatures plodded about on all four legs, bending their necks toward the ground to bite off hunks of vegetation. Their legs were extremely thin and knobby, with joints that seemed to bend the wrong way, and the creatures’ heavy, cumbersome, swaying bodies appeared disproportionately large by comparison. Each creature was slightly longer from the end of its rear to the front of its chest than Samuel was tall, and had a long, thick neck and a triangular-shaped forehead with prominent brows that slanted down toward its nose and mouth. They had eyes mounted on the sides of their heads, so that it seemed quite difficult for them to look directly ahead, and their entire bodies were covered in some thin, fibrous substance, almost like dense, brown, fine-bladed grass. Beyond these creatures, he could see a handful of terrified colonists fleeing across the meadow.

Penny came up beside him. “What are they? Where did they come from?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” he replied. Besides their fellow colonists, they had never seen any other sentient beings before in their lives.

The bizarre creatures paid them no mind. They swirled in a lazy herd about the meadow, stooping and chewing and snuffling, overtaking Samuel and Penny like puffy clouds carelessly blotting out the sun. Samuel receded as the creatures first approached, but they seemed harmless and he knew he would have to deal with them somehow. He took a hesitant step into the herd as it lapped around him. Penny grabbed half-heartedly at his arm, but he slipped out of her grasp without any effort. She followed in his wake. One of the animals looked at Samuel, its head turned sideways as its flat, glassy eye took him in but showed no more interest than if he were a tree or stone or blade of grass. Samuel stared back at the creature.

“Hello,” Samuel said. The creature chewed slowly. “Are you a dog?”

The creature gazed at him for a few seconds more, then turned away and continued its aimless pacing. Samuel looked back at Penny. She stood frozen. Across the meadow more groups of these animals plodded about, calm and unhurried, pausing occasionally to lower their heads and eat some grass or take a drink at the river. There were no other colonists in sight. One of the creatures passed very near to Samuel and he reached out a hand to let the coarse fibers covering its body brush through his fingers. The animal hardly noticed. The small herd engulfed them on all sides, neither advancing nor keeping their distance, a current pulsing against a pair of lily pads, wherever the mindless whim of nature may take it.

The scrap of paper tied to one of the creature’s necks hit Samuel like a splash of icy water to recall him from a dream. He leapt forward and grabbed it, studied the drawing it bore in the now-distinctive scrawl of black crayon.

Penny peered over his shoulder and asked, “What is it?”

But Samuel could make no sense of the drawing. He tucked it away and stared around him, overcome by the significance of these animals milling about the meadow, by the concerted will it must have taken to bring them here. Who were these people? The stunning nature of the action, the very brazenness of displaying their message on one of the creatures they had so miraculously produced—they knew he had chased them from the meal halls the other night and they were taunting him now, daring him to even try to come so close to catching them again.

The meal halls. He had seen them gathered outside one of the meal halls that night. It was as good a place to begin as any. Everything seemed in order when he reached the nearest hall. The door was closed and there was nothing amiss with the building’s exterior. Samuel circled to the back of the hall to investigate the smaller building that abutted it. Its walls were bare and polished, the same blank, off-white color as the hall, and as he came to the third side of the little building, he noticed a slight vertical crack in the exterior. He dug the broken window latch from his pocket and inserted it into this narrow seam. With considerable effort, he managed to pry back a nearly invisible panel that lay flush with the wall of the building. He slipped his fingers into the gap and opened the door wide enough to step inside.

A floor-to-ceiling chain-link fence divided the entire interior of the building and sectioned off about a quarter of the room. The midday sun beamed in through a full glass roof just as strongly as it did outside, and rows of what looked like tiny suns lined the walls and produced such an abundance of light that Samuel was forced to shade his eyes. Rows and rows of various potted plants, species Samuel had never even imagined existed, packed the majority of the room. In each row the plants rested on a single continuous shelf, which inclined gradually all the way up to the glass ceiling, zig-zagging back and forth between the near and far walls. A metal grate with square holes the size of one of Samuel’s fingers divided the other quarter of the room into two levels, one on the ground and another just above Samuel’s head. Two troughs filled with water lined the long wall of this section, one on each of the two floors. A single brown creature, identical to those in the meadows, shuffled about all alone on the upper level.

For a brief moment, the room was still and quiet, as though purposely giving Samuel ample opportunity to take it all in. Then all at once, everything sprang into motion. To Samuel’s right, the rows of plants began to move back and forth and slightly upward on shelves similar to the sliding platforms Samuel had observed in the tunnels of the food machines. As each box of plants reached the top of the room the motion of the conveyor pushed it into a hole in the opposite wall. At the same time, a panel in the floor next to each shelf opened, and a new box of mature plants was loaded into the vacant space at the bottom of each row.

Samuel watched, mesmerized, until a groan of protest from the animal to his left broke his dumbfounded awe. He turned and saw a metal partition that ran the width of the pen had eased away from the far wall and was methodically pushing across the ground floor of the cage. On the second level, a similar panel drove out from the near wall in the opposite direction, forcing the hapless creature toward the far end of the cage, which narrowed to the width of a single animal. The creature turned to face the panel, pitted its shoulder against the cold steel and dug its feet into the grated floor. The bright metal barrier halted for a moment against this weight, but then the creature’s small, hard, circular feet slipped on the grille of the floor, and the panel pressed forward. The poor animal stumbled backward. It recovered and dug its shoulder against the barrier with even greater desperation, but its first effort had sapped its strength. Its persistent moans increased in pitch and breathlessness as the panel drove inexorably forward to push the animal across its cage, one centimeter at a time.

Samuel stepped farther into the building, drawn by helpless fascination to the creature’s plight. From his position on the ground, looking up through the double grate of the fence and the upper floor, Samuel did not have the best view of the unfolding action. But he could see well enough. And he could hear everything: the thump of the animal’s shoulder as it launched itself against the steadily advancing panel, its feet scrabbling vainly against the frictionless floor, the pleading, wheezing breaths that quickly faded as exhaustion took hold; all of these sounds juxtaposed against the conspicuous absence of noise from the panel—no humming or churning of gears, no scraping of metal, just the slow and silent march of steel, as inevitable as time itself.

Its shoulder pressed against the metal barrier, the creature’s hindquarters entered the hole in the far wall first. A sudden whirring and grinding emanated from beyond the wall. For just a moment, the animal fell silent and its forelegs stopped pawing at the ground. Then the hush was broken by the most horrible sound Samuel had ever heard. The creature cried out in wordless agony, in one loud, long scream of pain and fear, a sound many humans have long believed animals cannot make, the sound that once raced, in an instant, through the minds of tens of thousands of men as they felt the cold steel of the guillotine blade bite into the backs of their necks and saw Death, hooded and menacing, lurking before them. Yet that silent cry lasted but an instant in the mind of the dying, while the sound made by the creature in that secret room went on and on and on. Its hind legs already devoured by the hole, the creature spun its forelegs over the slick grate and screamed and screamed. Samuel raced to the fence, dug his fingers into the spaces between the metal wires, and began to climb. But there was nothing he could do. He had not climbed half a meter when the screams became too much, his limbs grew weak, and he could climb no higher, go no closer.

He fell to the ground and just managed to catch himself on his feet. The screams grew louder and louder, limitless in their sheer panicked anguish. He jumped and danced to peer through the grate and fence that obstructed his view, though he was not sure he really wanted to see. The cries stopped. There was nothing, not even an echo, as though that dark hole had swallowed up sound itself. The creature was gone, save for a faint red mist and a few tufts of the coarse, brown fibers of its body that wafted down through the grate. Samuel’s knees buckled and he felt as though something inside of him had imploded and collapsed. Inside the cage, a trap door slid open and a new creature stepped out of the floor, spasmodically shaking its body to remove some unknown liquid from its fur. Samuel scarcely noticed. He stumbled to the door and out into the sunlight of the meadow. Penny stood there, and he did not know if she had followed him inside. He fell to his knees and was sick in the grass.

* * *

Penny stood over Samuel as he shuddered and spat the acrid taste from his mouth. In truth, he had not yet considered exactly what happened to the creature as it was pushed into the hole. His sickness was a purely visceral reaction to the horrifying sights and sounds of the incident. But now the grim realization dawned on him. And perhaps he had recognized it the whole time, perhaps the thought had lingered in the depths of his subconscious throughout the whole gruesome scene, for he knew now with absolute clarity that the creature in that room was no more, that whatever happened to it in there was the same thing that happened to the male who drank the bad river water and collapsed to the ground with his eyes wide and staring and fell into a sleep that was not really sleep, a sleep from which he would never awake.

Samuel gazed down at his own vomit in the green grass, then looked up and saw the blurry images of the brown creatures stooping to eat that same grass, and as the colors smeared together in a terrible, ugly mixture, at last Samuel knew what he had eaten three times a day, every day, for the whole length of his existence. He felt as though he would be sick again but his stomach was already empty. Several minutes passed before he recovered enough strength to stand. He needed to get away from it all, the room, the creatures, whatever colonists might still be lurking about. As best he could, he hobbled across the colony to the fence line and sat with his back against one of the posts. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, forced his thoughts over the sickness coursing through him. The late morning sun streamed down, hot and dry, upon his forehead. The wind died in the air.

He could not ignore the frightful origin of the meal cakes. Yet he knew nothing else. They were all he had ever eaten. And the duty that had plagued him the last several days, the thought of the whole colony thrown into starvation, crept up around the edges of his disgust. Several hundred colonists required food each day. And even with his new system of distributing equal cakes at three different meal halls, Samuel knew not every colonist received a normal ration. Yet now that he had learned something of how the meal cakes were made, to condemn those strange creatures to that same fate, that same fear and agony and death, one after another, day after day…

He felt Penny’s hand on his arm, opened his eyes and saw her seated beside him, her mouth twisted into a wrenching look of concern such as he had never seen before. Whatever might be said of these creatures, however innocent they might be, by all indications they were not like her. They would never be able to converse with him as she did, they would never care about him as she did, they would never value him for his mind as she did, because they did not speak, listen, love, think or value as she did, as he did. Yet still they did not deserve what end would eventually befall them. And for this he respected them all the more, thanked them reverently in his thoughts. Perhaps that was the difference: that he could respect them, thank them for their sacrifice. He did not know. But he could not let Penny suffer as they suffered. For now he could think of no other answer. But he vowed to himself to find another way, a better way.

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

Several 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. Samuel 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

They 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 when 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 remember you. When we were younger. Children. We used to play together.”

He racked 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.”

“But how do you know?”

“What we do every day. It’s where I found them.” He pointed at the now-connected scraps of paper, one after the other, beginning at the stick figure with the arrow pointing toward its head. “In the sleeping hall, in the food box in the meal hall, on the bridge in the meadow, on the creatures from the buildings by the meal halls, in the meadow by the river, in the meal hall, in my bed in the sleeping hall. We sleep, we eat, play in the meadow, eat again, back to the meadow, eat and go to sleep. The same thing every day.” He pointed at the pictures again in succession. “The head of the colony, where everything is controlled, it’s where they live. The ones who think, they sleep in the mountains where the sun goes down. There is a door there, and perhaps a picture like this one.” He pointed at the hand with the eye in the center. “That’s where I’m going. That’s where it ends. That’s where I will find answers.”

He gathered his blankets around him and moved toward the door.

Penny stood up. “Wait,” she said.

He stopped and looked back. He thought she would ask to go with him.

“It is almost night,” she said. “It will be dark and cold. Stay until morning. Please.”

Samuel hesitated. “Okay,” he said. He walked back toward her and gathered the scraps of paper into his tunic. “I will leave in the morning.”

Together they sat down again to wait out the rest of the day and night. When darkness fell she lay very close to him. Samuel slept quite soundly, Penny hardly at all.

XXIII

Samuel decided to set out after the morning meal. Penny remained at his side throughout the morning, but said little. They passed out meal cakes together and sat alone at one of the tables in the middle of the hall. Penny held her cake in her lap while Samuel ate. When he had taken his final bite, she stood and unwrapped the blanket from her body, leaving only a single thin bedsheet covering her tunics.

“Here,” she said, as she extended it toward him. “You will need it more than me.”

He took the blanket and thanked her. Then she handed him her uneaten meal cake. He took that as well, stowed it in the pocket of his tunic and thanked her again. He stood up. They stared at each other for a long while, the only two people in the middle of the hall, the other colonists folded against the walls. An overwhelming feeling of pity came over Samuel. She was so close. He wished she could come with him right now. Yet something inside him told him that she was not yet ready to join him, that he must face this test alone.

“I’ll be back soon,” he said. Only as the words escaped his lips did he envision what might happen after he discovered whatever was out there, and he realized that he really did intend to return to her no matter what happened. Penny bobbed her head and her lips quivered, and Samuel felt something inside his chest shudder. He put his hands on her shoulders and squeezed them firmly.

“I will call you Penny,” he said, speaking her new name for the first time, “if you like it.”

“I do like it,” she replied, and her face brightened to leave only the smallest trace of lingering shadow.

Penny wrapped her arms around Samuel and pulled him close in an embrace, squeezing him as hard as she could. He wrapped his arms around her and squeezed back. Her neck smelled like the river at the first light of day, clean and still and shimmery in the early morning rays. She released him and nudged him toward the door.

“You must leave now,” she said. “It is a long way to go.” She did not look at him.

Samuel bowed his head and gathered his things. “Goodbye, Penny,” he said. “I will see you when I return.”

“Goodbye.”

He stepped outside and took his first steps into the snow and did not look back.

* * *

That had been some hours ago. The snowfall had continued, unabated, throughout the night and the drifts now rose almost to Samuel’s knees. The soft white layers had transformed the meadow and reminded him of the foam spurting from the hole in the meal hall floor. The thick snow smoothed the gentle rise and fall of the land and clung to the trees, the old, gnarled branches reborn in sheets of purest ivory. Samuel passed beyond the fence line. The extra poles hung, half-removed from their supports, wooden skeletons peeking through white funeral shrouds, buried and forgotten long ago. The sun had started its descent in the sky, invisible behind the dark clouds though it lent them a faint, smoky glow that extended from above Samuel’s head and out in the direction toward which he now walked. The snow had fallen, and continued to fall, over the meadow outside the fence as well, and over the mountains in the distance, covering much of the hard black rock in soft white folds, except for a few sharp streaks of ebony where the rock was too narrow to hold the fluffy powder and had sliced through the drifts.

The bedding Samuel had wrapped around his body and feet was wet all the way through and he was soaked to the bone. He had long since lost feeling in his face and toes. He kept his hands wrapped inside the blankets but his fingers tingled with the onset of numbness as well. Yet he pressed on. He still carried Penny’s morning meal in the pocket of his tunic, and though he was quite hungry, he was determined to save it as a reward to himself once he reached the mountains. He refused to stop now, banished from his mind any thought of turning back. He had come this far, and to go back now would not just be to admit defeat, but to resign himself, Penny and all the other colonists to a slow death in a cramped meal hall, trapped inside forever by the snow and cold. Besides, he had quickly learned he only grew colder as his pace slackened, and so he made every effort to move as fast as he could, straight as an arrow toward the black mountains and the pale gray sky.

The afternoon wore on. Fatigue set in. Samuel pressed on, forgetting everything he had left behind him, his mind occupied only by a concerted resolve to ignore all thoughts of his painfully freezing body and focus on the sight of the ever-approaching mountains ahead. His stomach began to growl insistently. He thought about eating some of the meal cake, but he could not bring himself to expose his hands to the elements in order to raise the food to his mouth. Soon the old feeling of nausea returned and replaced the hunger in his stomach, though there were no colonists around this time to cause it. He shivered violently. The sun continued its descent in the sky and the faint glow behind the clouds settled over the mountains. The temperature continued to drop. In a few hours it would be night, and Samuel knew he must make the mountains soon after sunset, as he would not long survive the even more frigid chill of the darkness.

To his mind, his pace had not lessened, his direction remained true. But his footprints in the snow behind him told a different story. They had begun to waver of late, to veer haphazardly from side to side, and the space between each footfall grew less and less as he stumbled on. When the sun neared the horizon, the mountains ahead of him grew blurry to his sight as the lightness in the sky spread around the snow-capped peaks and lent them a faint aura of gold. The sun set abruptly, touching the mountains and dipping behind them in a matter of minutes, and the sky turned at once from gray to black. Within a few moments of darkness, Samuel could barely keep his eyes open. His footsteps became shorter and more unsteady. His hands were frozen into fists inside the sopping blankets and they trembled uncontrollably. And always, all around him, there was the cold, borne on the hard and frigid wind, rising out of the snow drifts as each step carried his foot deep into the icy crystalline powder, pressing down from the darkness of the sky as his frozen blankets bound him in an icy embrace.

He walked on, forced himself to put one foot in front of the other in a constant willing of motion, a painfully conscious signal passing over and over again from brain to nerve to leg. Each step was heavier and more sluggish than the previous. A cloud of warmth rose from his still-queasy stomach and spread into his chest and face. His head dragged with exhaustion and his eyes blurred. The snow at his feet appeared soft and inviting. He imagined falling asleep next to Penny curled up in a bed of clean, white, downy snow. He felt his body grow warmer, like feeling of the first rays of sun prickling his skin on a cool morning, except now the soft heat spread outward from deep inside of him with a tingling, numbing sensation. He wanted so badly to go to sleep, to slip into peaceful oblivion. But a whispered, insistent voice in the back of his mind kept reminding him there was something urgent he must do… if he could only remember what that was.

He stumbled and nearly fell face down in the snow. A cry rang out in his mind. Step. That was all. The warmth continued its crawl through his body. He could not feel his fingers, but at least they were no longer stiff and cold. It was like they had been mercifully removed from his hand, like he had slipped outside his body and was looking down on himself, watching this poor creature stagger across the barren and snowy plain, pitying himself, wishing he would just lie down and sleep so it would all be over. Step. There it was again. He focused on it, kept it always in mind, even as the insidious warmth and fatigue threatened to envelop him. In a way, the warmth was even worse than the cold. Step. The mountains were close now. In the cold he was still alive, painfully alive. But the warmth numbed the pain and numbed his mind, desensitized him completely. It made his body lord over his mind, blurred and confused his senses. Step.

He was in their shadow now. Their presence obscured any lingering trace of light from the black and cloudy sky. Step. His next step was upward. He was climbing now, hiking through a narrow trail he could not see, only feel. He slipped on icy snow layered upon hard, smooth, sharp rock. Step. It was the one thing that mattered, the most fundamental of all conscious decisions, the fulcrum upon which all will, action and life balanced. He fell to his hands and knees and crawled over the slick, jagged incline. Step. The sharp rocks cut into his hands and knees, but his frozen limbs did not feel the pain. He did not feel the blood pool in his palms and ooze down his legs, for his body was already soaked. Step. Not once did he think of how much farther he must go. The ground beneath his hands faded from his bleary sight and he saw before him a horde of dumb, shapeless, rabid creatures, made of nothing but slavering mouths and thousands upon thousands of grabbing hands, of warm, soft, unraveling blankets, and one word played over and over in his mind. Step. Step. Step.

From somewhere beyond him there came a dull thud and he could crawl no farther. He sat back on his heels and looked up. He had bumped his head against an unyielding barrier. Running a hand over it, he found it perfectly smooth without the flinty edges of the rocks beneath him. It was a door carved into the mountain, and drawn above it in white chalk on the rock face and barely visible to his delirious, blurred vision, was a hand with an eye in the center. Samuel grabbed the handle and pulled with all his might. The door crept open. With the last reserve of strength he could muster, Samuel rolled his numbed body over the threshold. The door closed behind him with a stolid thump, but he did not hear it. He was already fast asleep.

* * *

Samuel awoke to find himself in a dimly lit room. He was still cold, but sensation had returned to his limbs, and they ached with a blunt throbbing. Scabs had begun to form on his hands and knees. His head hurt and his mouth was dry. He sat up and pulled the meal cake from his pocket and began to eat. He did not realize until he took his first bite how hungry he was. His body felt limp and thoroughly worn out. He ate and studied his surroundings while he recovered his strength. He was in a dark, circular room, illuminated faintly by several video screens covering the walls. A thick, waist-high platform covered with several rows of lights, buttons, knobs and switches extended outward from the walls around the room. The low hum of electrical equipment was the only sound in the otherwise empty chamber. The videos showed various images of a snow-covered meadow and some buildings, pictures so vivid that Samuel could even make out the snow falling from the sky. He initially mistook these images for windows, until he realized they were actually moving pictures of the colony. There were several of these videos, each offering a different vantage point: the interiors and exteriors of the meal halls, sleeping halls and the rooms with the strange caged-in creatures and floor-to-ceiling plants, the snowy meadow and gray-clouded sky, and even the river, now frozen solid and crisscrossed by Samuel’s refurbished bridges.

Samuel pulled himself to his feet and staggered about the room, overwhelmed by the abundance of technologies beyond his wildest imagination. Each step in the long journey that eventually led him to this place was more impressive than the last, from the liquid-filled space beneath the meal hall floors, to the carefully calibrated food machines, to the entire horrifyingly clinical operation inside the secret rooms next to the meal halls. And though the actual details of the process were still beyond his understanding, Samuel realized that from this room a person could control every single mechanical aspect of the colony, including—he scarcely believed the thought as it first entered his mind—the actual weather.

Samuel hurried to the console that wrapped in one continuous arc around the circular room and stopped in front of a video of the snow still falling steadily over the colony. A multitude of buttons covered the console beneath this video, and in the midst of these buttons were four sliding controls, each with a switch that could be moved gradually between two extremes. Next to the top switch were five vertical dotted lines on the right side and nothing on the left. The second switch had a picture of a sun on the left, and on the right a puffy shape composed of many incomplete overlapping circles that somewhat resembled a cloud. The third had a red circle on the left and a blue one on the right. The fourth had nothing on the left, and on the right were five horizontal lines, which split into upward and downward curves at their rightmost ends. Each switch had been pushed to the far right of the control.

Samuel put his hand on the top control and tentatively slid it all the way to the left. Nothing happened at first on the video screen. Then, ever so gradually, the snow began to lessen, growing lighter and lighter, until within a few minutes it had stopped entirely. Encouraged, Samuel slid the second switch all the way to the left as well. On the video screen the dark clouds began to lighten to white, and then they dispersed altogether as the sun pushed its way through, bringing with it a clear, bright, blue sky. Samuel reached for the third switch and began to move it toward the left. The pictures did not change. He slid the control all the way to the left. Still nothing. He left it there and moved the fourth switch all the way to the left as well. Nothing happened on the video of the sky, but on the other screens, Samuel could see the trees in the meadow fall still as the winds ceased. To his great disbelief, Samuel realized he was actually controlling the weather in the colony. The first, second and fourth switches must control the snow, clouds and wind. He guessed that the third switch must affect the temperature, and he moved it to the center of the control.

Samuel stared at the video screens around him in awe. In the meal halls, the colonists began to stir. On one screen, Samuel thought he saw Penny rise from her seat against a wall. He rushed to the video and studied it, but the image was not detailed enough to know for certain. He scanned the console hurriedly, looking for some way to enhance the picture, but he could not make sense of the other controls. The lone figure on the screen stepped lightly to the hall door and pushed it open. Samuel spun around and found a video of the meal hall exterior as the door opened and a figure emerged. He felt his face grow warm and the meal cake turned over in his stomach. It must be Penny; it could be no one else. She gazed around her and spread out her arms as if to embrace the warm air. Samuel imagined her face alight in the sun’s fresh rays, but she was just a tiny figure against the wide expanse of the meal hall. Then she walked away from the door and out into the meadow where patches of green grass had started to appear beneath the melting snow. She moved carefully at first, as if stepping out into the world for the first time. Samuel reached out and touched her picture on the screen. Penny walked to the edge of the image and then off it. Samuel turned to find her on another video, following her path on the screens in a circle around the room as she strolled across the meadow.

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

Samuel 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,” Samuel 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.

“Pastor is thanking the cow for its sacrifice,” Fia whispered to Samuel.

Pastor drew a sharp, metal tool from his belt. He stepped to the animal’s side and stroked the back of its neck. Then in one quick motion, he held the cow’s head in one hand and drew the tool across its throat with the other. A bright red liquid spurted against the white fur on its chest as its knees buckled and it slumped to the ground and lay there motionless.

Samuel shuddered at the memory of the cow in the enclosed room behind the meal hall. “Is it…?” he whispered to Fia.

“Yes,” she replied. “We do our best to make it painless.”

Samuel looked at the cow’s wide eyes and open mouth and thought of the face of the male who died from drinking the poisoned river water. Pastor stooped down and gently wiped the creature’s eyelids closed.

“Does Pastor make the meal cakes too?” Samuel asked.

Fia laughed. She took his arm and began to lead him from the building.

“We do not have meal cakes here,” she said. “Pastor will prepare the cow for us to eat. He will make sure that all parts of it are used for some purpose. They are very valuable animals. Like humans, the females also produce a liquid that is good to drink. What we do not eat we can use for building and making clothes and blankets.”

Back outside, Fia led Samuel to another part of the colony where other colonists tended to a variety of plants, even more than Samuel had seen in the secret rooms in his own colony. There were rows and rows of many bright green leafy plants of all sizes and shades and varieties, bunches of wispy golden stalks, and even some trees adorned with vibrantly colored spheres of red and green and orange.

“This is where the rest of our food is grown,” said Fia. “They are like those plants you discovered in the greenhouses.”

Samuel stared at the verdant fields in amazement. “There are so many.”

“Yes,” said Fia, “and they are all good to eat, and they all taste different.”

“What do you mean?”

“They do different things to your mouth. They are not like meal cakes. I will show you later.”

She led him on to see all the many sights and activities of their colony. There were whole buildings dedicated to different endeavors. Some were small structures occupied by one or two people, while others were nearly as long as the halls in Samuel’s colony but only about three meters high. In one of the smaller buildings, a woman dressed in a brightly colored shirt of pale green and blue swirls sat before a wooden rack lined with many colored strings and wove them together to make large pieces of fabric. Fia introduced her as Huri and explained that she and her helpers made the clothing for every person in their colony. None of these colonists dressed in the plain off-white smocks of Samuel’s colony. Fia herself wore a bright red open-necked shirt and loose white pants.

In the next building, Olla and his assistant Hesta molded hard red soil into flat circles and deep half-spheres and heated them in a large metal container to make the dishes used for serving food throughout the colony. In other small huts, different people shaped pieces of metal into tools and dried out cow skin and fashioned it into a variety of containers and clothing. Still others painted pictures in a multitude of vivid colors or carved figures out of stone, merely to create objects that were pleasing to the eye.

Next they visited one of the larger halls, which was lined with wooden tables that stretched the length of the building. Dozens of people sat bent over these tables and furiously scribbled numbers, words and diagrams, pored over piles of paper, and tinkered with all kinds of metals, glasses, wires, plants and fabrics.

“This is where I work,” said Fia. “The people in this building are trying to understand more about our world.”

She led Samuel to a space at one of the tables where a single darkened light bulb rested next to a collection of glass and metal and wires. “I am working with lights,” she said as she gestured to the objects on the table. “We have them in the mountains and in your greenhouses. We have discovered how they work, but now we are trying to build our own.”

Samuel gazed around at the many gadgets beyond his comprehension.

“Everything you have seen so far, in your colony and in ours, someone here is trying to improve,” said Fia. “Humans built your colony long ago, and now we want to discover how these things work so we may use them for ourselves and make them better.”

She led Samuel into another long hall with floor-to-ceiling shelves on both sides, all of them stacked high with sheets of paper bound in dried cow skins.

“This is the library,” said Fia, as she removed one of the heaps of paper from its shelf, “and these are books. They contain information and stories about the world so we can learn from them. Some of these were brought here from Earth by the first people to come to Pearl. That is how we know of our ancestors.”

The next building, on the opposite side of the library from the workshop, was about half the length of the previous two halls. Fia opened the door, and together they peered inside. A large circular table dominated the room, with many rows of empty wooden benches beyond it. The middle of the table had also been cut out in a circle, and there were people seated all around the inside and outside of the table. They spoke incessantly and seemed to be arguing about something, but their words came so quickly, and many were beyond Samuel’s understanding.

“These people help make the rules for our colony,” whispered Fia. “They discuss what they think is best for us to do until they agree on a new rule or a change to an old one. Then the rest of us gather and choose whether or not we will accept their idea. Right now they are trying to decide how the food and other products should be distributed.”

“What do you mean?” asked Samuel.

Fia closed the door. “Every person in our colony must work in some way. We each get to choose the activity we most enjoy. And because we each make something different, we share our products with one another. So Pastor and the other herders share the food they get from the cows, just as Huri shares the clothing she makes. But some people think this sharing should be done differently. And that is what they are trying to decide.”

Samuel nodded.

“The most important thing is that each person does something with his mind. That is the first rule of our colony: ‘Each human must use his mind actively and productively in the way it is meant to be used.’ That is the standard of our race, that we can think, that we can use our minds to solve problems and make the world better for ourselves. So everyone who lives in this colony must do just that.”

“Yes, our colony does not have that,” said Samuel. A troubling thought occurred to him. “But what about a rule against hurting another person?”

Fia’s brow wrinkled. “Of course,” she said, “that goes without saying.”

“But…”

“What?” asked Fia.

“I don’t know. Never mind.”

Fia waited a moment but Samuel remained silent. They walked on, exploring everything else there was to see in the colony until the sun hovered over the horizon and the sky blazed bright orange.

* * *

As the sun set, they came to the building where Fia lived, a small wooden house with walls made of long cylindrical poles stacked lengthwise one on top of the other. The interior had no floor, only hard, compact dirt, so smooth and even it did not stain the bottoms of their feet. The ceiling was constructed from more wooden poles laid parallel to one another atop the walls, with the gaps between the wood sealed with packed brown earth. Each wall had a large square window filled with a glass pane. Two beds and a simple wooden table and chairs furnished the room.

Fia set about making the evening meal. She handed Samuel a metal pail and asked him to fetch some water from the pond. By the time he returned, Fia had laid out the food to be prepared on the table. There was a thick slab of some fleshy crimson substance Fia said had come from one of the cows, a mixture of leaves of different sizes and shades of green, and two square-shaped pieces of a soft, roughly textured food called “bread,” which Fia told him she had made from the tan-colored plants in the meadow. She cooked the cow meat over a wispy orange light that flickered and danced inside a metal shell.

When they sat down to eat, Fia picked up the two metal rods that lay on the table next to her plate. A matching set rested at Samuel’s place, one of them pressed into a sharp edge along one half of the tool, the other with what almost looked like a hand at one end. Samuel picked up the tools and stared at them curiously.

“I doubt you have used a fork and knife before,” Fia said, her eyes sparkling with that familiar copper gleam.

Samuel shook his head. Fia held the tools aloft and indicated for Samuel to follow suit. She used the four prongs of the fork to stab her portion of meat and hold it in place, then cut off a bite-sized piece with her knife and raised it to her mouth on the spears of the fork. Samuel watched her and tried to imitate as best he could, knowing he must have looked as uncomfortable as he felt.

“Something else that sets us apart from the animals,” said Fia. Samuel looked up from his struggles with the cow meat and saw her smiling at him kindly.

He forced a grin as he turned the meat over in his mouth. “I guess so.”

They ate in silence for a while. Samuel kept his head down, but peered up occasionally from under his brow to watch Fia handle her utensils. She finished her meal before Samuel was even halfway done. When his hands hurt from gripping the fork and knife so tightly, he set them down and looked at Fia. She watched him without a shred of impatience or amusement at his struggles.

“Do you remember me?” he asked.

“Of course,” she answered. “You were one of those who followed me. You and that woman.”

“Penny,” said Samuel.

“Yes. Penny.”

Samuel looked back down at his food. He picked up his utensils and managed to cut off another piece of meat. He chewed it slowly and swallowed. “What happens now?”

Fia’s face clouded briefly. “You are allowed to stay one night as our guest. But tomorrow you must choose.”

“Choose?” Samuel asked. “Choose what?”

“Whether or not you will live here with us from now on.”

XXV

Samuel awoke the next morning to find Leomedes seated at the table in the middle of the room. Fia was preparing the morning meal.

“Good morning, Samuel,” said Leomedes. “I trust Fia has taken good care of you.”

“Yes, she has,” Samuel replied. “Good morning.”

Fia served the food into three bowls and set them on the table. “Come and eat,” she said to Samuel.

The meal consisted of a mixture of some rough, beige flakes with a subtle flavor similar to bread, and some sweet-tasting slices of the brightly colored spheres that grew on the trees in the meadow. Samuel could not imagine eating meal cakes again. When they had finished, Fia cleared the dishes away from the table. Leomedes stood up.

“Thank you Fia,” he said. “Everything was wonderful.” He turned to Samuel. “Come with me. There is something I want to show you. Goodbye, Fia. We will see you later.”

“Goodbye, Fia,” said Samuel. “Thank you for everything.”

Fia poured some water on the dishes and began to clean them in the metal basin next to the fireplace. She looked up and held Samuel’s gaze for a moment. Faint creases had appeared under her eyes and in the hollows of her cheeks. “You’re very welcome, Samuel,” she said. “I will see you later.”

They walked outside. The early morning sun was yellow and bare and starkly beautiful in the vast cloudless sky. Leomedes led Samuel across the meadow toward the mountains. The grass felt rich and springy under his feet.

“Well, Samuel,” said Leomedes, “did you enjoy your stay?”

“Yes, yes I did,” Samuel replied.

“Good. Did Fia answer all your questions?”

“Yes. Everything I asked. But I was also wondering, how do you control the weather?”

“That I do not know,” Leomedes answered. “We know how to use the machine in the control room. You figured that out yourself. It must have been built by the first humans who came to Pearl, the people who created your old colony. But how the machine actually affects the weather remains a secret of those who came before us. Perhaps that is something you could help us discover.”

Two young men ran up beside them. They were both built like Leomedes, thin and wiry-strong, but their bodies were well-hidden beneath loose, off-white tunics—the same clothing worn by members of Samuel’s old colony.

“Excuse me,” said Leomedes, and he ushered the men a few meters away from Samuel where they held a brief whispered conversation. When they had finished, the two men raced away in the direction of the mountains. Leomedes rejoined Samuel.

“We are preparing the challenges to bring the next student to our colony,” he said. “Come, I will show you.”

They walked to the mountain and Samuel followed Leomedes up the stairs and into the dimly lit tunnel. After five minutes, they emerged into the spacious chamber where they had first met, and then Leomedes led Samuel back into the mountain control room. Leomedes moved to the circular console and began to scan the video screens.

“Come here,” he said, beckoning to Samuel.

He pointed at the video in front of him and touched a control on the console below the screen. The image grew larger, centering on a throng of colonists gathered in one of the meal halls. Penny knelt at the center of the crowd, distributing meal cakes at the morning meal.

Samuel hurried forward, eyes fixed to the screen.

“You know her, don’t you?” asked Leomedes. “She is your friend?”

“Penny…” Samuel stared at the tiny image in disbelief. It seemed impossible to imagine Penny passing out meal cakes to a horde of colonists after what he had seen the previous day.

“Penny,” Leomedes repeated.

Samuel shook off his daze and turned to look at him. “Penny. Yes, she is my friend.”

“You have done well with her,” Leomedes said. “She has come a long way. But now she is ready to go one step further.”

“What do you mean?” asked Samuel.

“She is the next one we will bring here,” said Leomedes. “We are preparing the next set of challenges for her.”

Samuel stared at Leomedes for a moment, then back at the video. Penny had finished passing out the meal cakes and was putting the box back on the wall. She turned to leave the hall, her own meal cake in hand, then paused for a moment and looked up, gazing right out of the video screen at Samuel. Samuel leaned forward and steadied himself against the console. He stared back into her eyes, big and glossy as ever. For a moment they seemed to shimmer with some faint spark, though perhaps it was only the video or a trick of the light in the meal hall. But then she looked away and walked toward the door. Samuel turned to follow her on another screen as she exited the meal hall, but Leomedes stopped him.

“Come,” he said. “It is time.”

Leomedes walked to the tunnel. Samuel scanned the videos once more, then followed him back to the large anteroom. The departed heroes of Samuel’s colony waited for him there, Fia among them. Leomedes walked ahead of Samuel to stand with his people. Samuel slowed to a stop in front of them.

“Well, Samuel,” Leomedes began. “You have seen our colony. You have seen the world we are trying to create. Now you must decide whether or not you wish to stay here.”

Samuel stared back at Leomedes, but he did not know what to say. Too many thoughts rushed through his mind. The eyes of those gathered behind Leomedes fell heavily upon him.

“Well?” said Leomedes. “Will you join us?”

He took a step toward Samuel and held out his arm in a welcoming gesture. Yet something about this action struck Samuel the wrong way.

“I… I don’t know,” he replied.

Leomedes stopped in his tracks and sneered incredulously. “You don’t know? What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I…”

“Do you wish you had not learned all you have?”

“No.”

“Do you wish you had not come here at all?”

“No.”

“Do you wish you could go back to living like them?”

“No, of course not.”

“Of course not. There is nothing for you there. You have seen it for yourself. You have felt the heavy, heavy burden of thinking for them, of providing for them. You have been a slave to those who do not possess one shred of the intelligence they would need to truly command you. You are free. Your mind makes you free. There is no reason to imprison yourself among them anymore.”

Fia stepped forward to stand just behind Leomedes.“I know why you hesitate,” she said. “I too have stood where you stand. I too have faced the same decision you now face. But he is right,” she said, glancing toward Leomedes. “If you go back to your old colony, you will forever use your mind only to serve the needs of others. You will have to solve their problems for them. You will have to feed them and protect them the whole of each day, for every day from now until your end. But if you join us, you will be able to use your mind however you want, to solve the problems you wish to solve, to answer the questions you ask yourself in your own mind.”

“All of us here stand upon the brink of a new world,” Leomedes said. “This land, this planet, is still unknown to us. You can help us learn what we wish to know. We want you to help us. And we want to help you learn that which stimulates your mind as well.”

Samuel looked at Fia and then at Leomedes. He glanced down and nodded slowly. But still he did not step forward.

Leomedes went on. “If you join us, you will help us learn and understand and move forward in our knowledge. But if you return to them, you will forever doom them to an eternity without these things, without even thought. For as long as you are a part of that colony, they will never be compelled to learn for themselves. Every challenge they face, you will solve for them. Every question that needs answering and requires the least bit of thought, you will answer for them. And why shouldn’t you? You now possess the intellect to do, in a matter of moments, what it would take their feeble minds days or weeks to accomplish. But as long as you think for them, they will never think for themselves. And then the last vestiges of humanity will be lost.”

“I do not wish to think for those who do not think for themselves,” said Samuel.

“Of course not,” Leomedes replied. “So join us. Together we will help develop their minds. We will help them relearn how to think. We will restore humanity.”

“But what about the people who do not learn?” Samuel asked. “What about the people who do not think for themselves? What will happen to them?”

Leomedes’ face hardened, and his sharp cheekbones pressed against the skin like the mountain rock under layers of snow. “Ah, yes,” he said. “You worry about what our challenges will do to those who are not strong enough to take the path you have followed. But let me ask you something. You encountered the cows in the greenhouses next to the meal halls. You know what happens to them. You know how they are made into the food you eat. And yet you continue to eat it. Why? Because they do not think as you do. Because if you had to make a choice between creatures like them and creatures like yourself, you would choose to save those like yourself without any hesitation. But tell me then, what is the difference between those creatures and the so-called people of the colony, who scarcely possess one single shred more intellect than other animals, who willfully deny the privilege of thought with every breath they take, who live off the minds of you and others like you who have provided them with everything they need to survive, devouring it all slowly and thoughtlessly, with the same blank stare as cows eating grass from the meadow?”

Samuel had no answer. He looked away from Leomedes and his eyes met Fia’s gaze, and in that one glance he realized she understood him instantly, knew him as well as she knew herself, because they were one and the same. And in that moment, Samuel knew he would never need to explain his innermost thoughts to her, that in her presence he would never be plagued by the constant haunting trepidation that she would not understand him, that no one would understand him, that he would always be alone.

And then he thought of Penny. Thought of her dark, shining eyes, eyes that shone from without, not from within, eyes that captured the whole world in their dark depths but seemed to hold no light of their own. Thought of the way her brow furrowed as he spoke to her, the way her face grew tighter and tighter in frustrated concentration as his voice rose with excitement. Thought of her soft, shy smile. Thought of the look on her face as she handed him her meal cake before she sadly ushered him out into the snow. Thought of their night walks together through the cool meadows of the colony. Thought of the first time they had spoken, and the last.

“I will not join you,” he said, very quietly at first.

Leomedes did not seem to hear him and took a short step forward, but then stopped as Samuel’s words reached him at last.

“What?” he asked, an edge in his voice. “What did you say?”

“I will not join you,” Samuel repeated, louder this time, his shoulders thrown back, neck taut, back rigid, arms relaxed at his sides.

No one spoke. Leomedes’ face drew tight for a moment and then a slow smirk began to creep back over his lips. Samuel turned on his heel and started for the tunnel behind him, his gaze passing once more over Fia’s. Their eyes met for just an instant, but Samuel thought he saw a look of understanding in them still. Then their bright copper gleam was gone, and he was walking down the dark passage out of the cavern. No one moved. No one made a sound. He was halfway through the tunnel when he heard Leomedes erupt into laughter behind him, the sound booming off the walls of the cavern and surrounding him in the passage. But still no one moved to stop him. No one followed him.

He emerged into the circular room with the video screens on the walls and the console below with all its buttons, switches and levers. He scanned the videos until he found one that showed the interior of one of the meal halls. A switch lay below the screen between two sets of pictures, one on the left with circles of many different sizes, the other on the right with several circles of equal size. The switch was set to the left, and Samuel flipped it back to the right. He took one more glance around the room, at the video monitors, the lights, the buttons, knowing full well his last action was futile, that anything that happened in their little colony could be undone by a simple flick of one of these switches. He could still hear Leomedes’ laughter ringing in his ears. He gathered his blankets, went to the door and opened it.

It was late morning. The sun shone brilliantly in the clear blue sky. He closed the door behind him and the laughter in his head died out. He gazed out across the wide and empty meadows. In the distance, he could make out the buildings of the colony. He shaded his eyes against the bright morning sun and began to walk.

XXVI

Samuel returned to the colony before the evening meal. The sun was low in the sky and sinking toward the mountains behind him, and his shadow raced ahead to touch the fence line before he reached it himself. He pulled himself wearily over the fence, and when he set foot on the other side, he stopped for a moment and waited. The dozen white halls rose up, polished and monolithic, above the velvet meadow. He could not even think of where he wanted to go. He rambled aimlessly, hoping to avoid anything that might remind him of everything he had given up by leaving the other colony behind.

Then he heard a shout from across the meadow. He turned and saw a figure in the distance, near the top of a hill. She ran down the slope, reached the bottom and sprinted toward him across the meadow, her arms and legs pumping smooth and straight, her feet skimming lightly over the grass. Samuel moved toward her, his stride quickening as he grew nearer. Penny leapt on top of him and he staggered backward as she threw her arms around him and hugged him even harder than when he had left.

She opened her mouth to speak, and Samuel expected the words to rush out of her all at once. But she swallowed and composed herself and said, “You came back.”

“Yes,” he said. “I told you I would.”

She flung her arms out to the meadow around them. “And you fixed it. Everything. At midday I went to pass out the meal cakes and they were all the same size. And the sky—”

“You passed out the meal cakes?” he asked. “This whole time?”

Her face brightened with pride. “Yes, of course. And at the midday meal today they were all the same size again, so I took the boxes away. But tell me everything. What happened to you?”

Samuel hesitated, not sure where to begin, not sure he wanted to begin. The sound of bells interrupted his thoughts.

“You must be hungry,” she said. “Let’s go eat.” And she linked her arm under his and began to pull him toward the nearest meal hall. “Let’s get our food and you can tell me what happened.”

They ate their evening meal together on top of a hill and watched the sun sink behind the mountains. Penny asked many questions, and Samuel answered them as briefly as he could. He felt numb and entranced, and his experiences of the past few days seemed to race too quickly through his mind for him to see them clearly. Or perhaps they moved too slowly, interminably slow, so that he could not recognize them for what they were, as a person looking at a sprouting seedling will not know it as a flower. Somewhere in the background Penny’s voice ran on and his own answered from time to time, and he saw the hand of the sun recede behind the black mountains, saw its bright fingers reach across the wide expanse of the meadow from the distant peaks to the hill where they sat in no time at all, then gently fall back to the mountains and fade behind them as the night rolled in.

* * *

They stayed up quite late that night, for Samuel did not feel at all tired, and when Penny’s eyelids began to flutter shut, they went to a sleeping hall and lay down in adjacent beds. She fell asleep at once, but he stayed awake the whole night, scarcely able to close his eyes. He rose as soon as the first rays of sun melted through the windows of the sleeping hall. Penny lay sound asleep in the next bed, her chest barely rising with her easy, measured breaths. He watched her for a moment, then stripped the sheets from his bed and carried them out into the meadow. He walked across the soft grass still damp with early morning dew to the greenhouse at the back of the nearest meal hall, found the concealed doorway and went inside.

Samuel fought to block out the low groans of distress from the cows in the cage to his left and went immediately to the rows of plants that occupied most of the room. Choosing four different rows, he removed one box of plants from each row. He spread the two bedsheets on the floor and placed two boxes in the middle of each sheet, then gathered the corners of the sheets and tied them together to form two bundles. He left them on the floor of the greenhouse and returned to the sleeping hall, sat on his empty bed and waited for Penny to wake. She stretched and yawned and grinned at him through half-closed eyes.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Good morning.”

She lay in bed for a moment, luxuriating in the starchy sheets wrapped around her body. The sound of the bells drifted faintly through the windows of the hall.

“Are you hungry?” he asked. She yawned again and nodded, and they stood together and walked to the door. They went to the nearest meal hall, received their meal cakes, carried them outside and ate as they strolled through the meadow.

At last Samuel spoke. “Penny, if I left this place, today, now, would you come with me?”

She paused a moment and looked at him, as if trying to determine if he was serious. “Yes,” she said.

His gaze flashed toward the meadow beyond her as if distracted by something she could not see. “Finish your food,” he said, “and then we will go.”

Samuel led her to the greenhouse he had visited earlier that morning. The two sheets with the plants wrapped inside waited where he had left them. Samuel went to the cage, opened the door and allowed four cows to exit. He grabbed one of the bundles of plants and hoisted it over his shoulder. Penny did the same. Then he directed the four cows out into the meadow and closed the greenhouse door behind him.

Samuel and Penny led the cows out to the fence line where Samuel had removed the cross poles. They passed between two naked support posts and out into the meadow beyond the colony.

“Where are we going?” Penny asked.

Samuel raised his chin toward the open meadow. “Wherever we want.”

They turned to the right and walked across stiff green grass under a clean blue sky. The mid-morning sun cast their long shadows behind them. Samuel felt a tremor race through his body as the sun washed away the cool morning breeze. Looking to his side, he saw Penny’s eyes fixed straight ahead, the light full on her face. He gazed forward once more. The meadow before them was vast and untouched. There was nothing between them and the mountains in the distance, save a wide field of grass and a few scattered trees.

From the handwritten manuscript
“The Early History of the pearl colony”

In the year 2153, the scourge of cancer was eradicated from the face of Earth. A team of British oncologists led by Dr. Thomas Greene first developed a prototype cure for the host of diseases in 2089 by engineering an enzyme (later named epidermal growth factor receptor-mediated endonuclease III) to target cells that overexpressed the epidermal growth factor receptor, a trait common to metastasizing cancer cells. This synthetic enzyme selectively infiltrated the targeted cells and cleaved the cells’ DNA. Dr. Greene and his staff employed their treatment with abundant success in clinical trials on lung and breast cancer patients in the same year, and by 2091 modifications of the enzyme could be used in therapies against all forms of cancer. In 2096, the pharmaceutical company Omega Laboratories purchased the rights to Dr. Greene’s patented enzyme and began worldwide distribution of the drug under the trade name Neoplastase. Within fifteen years Omega could manufacture Neoplastase at such little cost that it could be sold at a profit to any hospital, pharmacy or health clinic in the world.

Yet even with an effective cure so widely available, human beings continued to contract cancer. Indeed in the world’s poorer nations, cancer remained an affliction until the late 2140s. But the combined forces of heredity and human endeavor would eventually take their toll. The turn of the 22nd century saw the continued homogenization of race and ethnicity, a consequence stemming not only from technological advances in communication and transportation that brought human beings together from across the globe, but also from the steady erosion of strict cultural and religious values. And while highly polarized blocs of religious extremists and cultural conservatives remained in regions such as western Asia, northern Africa, Central America, northern South America and southeastern North America, by and large humans became increasingly willing to unite outside once-rigid social boundaries. The combination of these conditions resulted in the gradual amalgamation of once-diverse peoples into homogeneous, brown-skinned, multiracial individuals, large numbers of which first appeared in southern Africa and southwestern North America. But of course these phenotypic convergences were merely the consequence of genotypic tendencies toward a stable norm. Evolution had been at work since the dawn of humankind to drive those few sequences with a cancerous or otherwise malignant predisposition out of the gene pool, and as the faces of mankind became one, so too did their genetic makeup.

Even so, nature is never hasty, and outbreaks of cancer continued to arise from genetic mutations engendered either by sheer caprice or by the ever-growing abundance of carcinogens produced by so-called human progress. But in 2128, a group of Indian oncologists led by Dr. Ashakiran Avani discovered a general vaccination that could prevent mutation by carcinogenic agents. The key for Dr. Avani and her staff was the discovery, identification and isolation of a particular protein from the maitake mushroom (Grifola frondosa). This protein, coined “frondosavani,” proved to be both mildly oncogenic and common to all known carcinogens. In clinical trials on rats, subjects injected with small doses of frondosavani experienced minor benign neoplastic tumors that disappeared without any trace within a few weeks. Furthermore, once treated, these subjects proved immune to any hint of cancerous infection even after exposure to a variety of common mutagens. In 2135, after years of further testing, Dr. Avani’s laboratory made frondosavani available as an anti-cancer vaccination. By 2141, it was prevalent throughout all corners of the world. And finally, on the morning of June 6, 2153, the Global Health Organization (GHO) in London announced that cancer had at long last been cured.

In 2189, the GHO announced a cure for human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS ), another dreaded disease of the 21st century. Dr. Kameko Yamashita and her team of Japanese virologists engineered the first clinically successful vaccine against HIV in 2147, after a decade of research based on the early 22nd century work of a group of South African virologists. The South Africans, led by Dr. Christian van de Saal, had been employed by a wealthy Capetonian horse breeder in 2108 to find a cure for the equine infectious anemia virus (EIA, better known as “swamp fever”) endemic to horses in that region. While recombining viral RNA in search of a vaccine against EIA, Dr. van de Saal and his team stumbled upon a new strain of the virus capable of infecting cattle. At first, Dr. van de Saal feared this new variant, which he named bovine infectious anemia (BIA), might do serious damage to the South African cattle industry if ever transmitted on a large scale; however, subsequent tests showed that the virus was only present in cattle in the subacute form, could not be transmitted from mother to calf and was nonlethal. Consequently, BIA was largely ignored, and Dr. van de Saal continued with his previous EIA research.

When Dr. Yamashita came across Dr. van de Saal’s work in 2135, HIV/AIDS researchers had resorted to the random recombination of various retroviruses in hopes of stumbling upon a potential vaccine. When she infected a test group of cattle with BIA, Dr. Yamashita discovered that these cows developed immunity to bovine immunodeficiency virus (BIV), a disease that emerged among cattle in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These promising results led Dr. Yamashita to suspect that some recombinant form of BIA might serve as a vaccine against HIV. In 2147, after twelve years of research, Dr. Yamashita announced the first successful human trials of her HIV vaccine. The key step in the development of the vaccine was the synthesis of an entire viral membrane for the modified BIA virus. The synthetic membrane consisted of the gp120 envelope glycoprotein characteristic of the membrane of HIV, as well as receptors specifically designed to stimulate human immune responses in the form of both cytotoxic T lymphocytes and memory B cells, thereby triggering the body’s production of the necessary antibodies to stave off HIV infection. After two more years of experimental trials, Dr. Yamashita released her HIV vaccine for global distribution in 2149.

By that time, AIDS was no longer the terror it had been throughout most of the 21st century. The incipient cancer cure, as well as cures for a multitude of other human maladies, ensured that AIDS—itself a mostly nonlethal disease—resulted in far fewer deaths than in decades past. Still, some complications remained. Japan reported zero incidences of AIDS in 2156, and near exterminations were reported in the United States and several European nations during that same decade. But the disease persevered in other parts of the globe, most notably in certain northern and central African nations, where militant dictators regulated the distribution of the vaccine as part of a vicious ploy to maintain political power. Eventually, the situation improved under the combined influence of internal revolutions and sustained external political pressure, but in 2163, the German government announced an outbreak of AIDS at a hospital in Munich. The virus, perhaps one of the most adaptive the world had ever known, had mutated. The race for a cure was on once more. Finally, in 2183, a joint effort from virologists and pathologists around the globe produced a series of vaccines that neutralized all known strains of the virus. And on September 30, 2189, the long-awaited GHO announcement came: AIDS was dead.

As was mentioned earlier, science had made significant progress in the fight against several of humanity’s previously uncured diseases throughout the 22nd century. A complete account of the development of every cure would require more time and space than is necessary to devote to these annals. Instead, the author of this brief history simply offers the following list of many such illnesses and the year in which they were declared to be cured.

-polio: 2056

-Huntington’s disease: 2087

-muscular dystrophy: 2094

-osteoporosis: 2116

-cystic fibrosis: 2143

-cancer: 2153

-Ebola virus: 2160

-Tay-Sachs disease: 2162

-amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig’s
disease): 2178

-influenza: 2181

-multiple sclerosis: 2186

-HIV/AIDS: 2189

-Alzheimer’s disease: 2192

-diabetes mellitus: 2195

-acute viral nasopharyngitis (common cold): 2207

Thus by the early 23rd century, science had all but rid the Earth of those many diseases that had plagued humankind throughout its existence. Geneticists continued to explore the hereditary aspects of such maladies, and in 2234, the first genetically enhanced, disease-resistant human child was born. From that point on, man had no more reason to fear death or discomfort from the world that existed beyond his sight.

Yet at the dawn of that first day without human ailment, the day when all the brilliant microbiologists and virologists and oncologists woke up to find themselves idle and obsolete, who can ever say whether that new world was better served to the comfort of humankind than the old one of disease and pestilence and plague? Some millennia ago, the great thinker Plato wrote that all kings should be philosophers. But perhaps in truth it would have been better that all kings had been scientists, for there were more than a handful of politicians of that time who, believing themselves capable of understanding the world’s intricate and myriad connections and synapses, would have willingly sacrificed millions of Somalis, Swazis, Haitians and Afghanis to disease, starvation and eventual death in the perhaps disillusioned hope that the world would be a better place for the survivors.

But scientists and politicians are two different sorts of men and the will of nature is beholden to neither. For if the human world may be likened to a house, then the scientists are the builders, the fixers, the problem solvers, shortsighted perhaps but persistent and unfailing in their aims, while the politicians are the architects, the foremen, the overseers, all with an apparently flawless blueprint in their hands but perhaps lacking the insight or foresight to realize their great plan. Yet little unity exists between the builders and architects, as the builders fix every problem in their own way and ignore the shrieking demands of the architects, who are constantly revising the blueprint, sometimes adding a new wing for good measure or perhaps filling in the basement when the foundation seems weak, despite the builders’ tireless contentions that a solution is always possible. However, nature is not some passive collection of wood and brick and mortar to be shaped by humans into whatsoever they desire. Nature builds the house of the world herself, and so the scientists, politicians, nature and the rest of humanity are always at odds as to the final form of the edifice.

So as the reader of this history will undoubtedly surmise, Earth’s human population skyrocketed in the late 22nd century. By that time, global population had climbed steadily for some centuries, having surpassed 10 billion people in 2050. The growth rate declined slightly in the next half century as several countries passed laws to limit the number of childbirths per family. But these measures were not enforced in nations where they were perhaps most necessary—for example, the population of sub-Saharan Africa continued its dramatic climb—and it was also these nations that were most dramatically affected by cures for the world’s diseases. In 2100, global population hovered around 13 billion, but it would nearly double in the next century, with the most significant boom following the cure of AIDS. In 2198, the world’s population reached 24 billion people. From 2050 to 2200, the population of Africa more than tripled, reaching 6 billion people in 2196. Two centuries earlier there had been only 6 billion people in the entire world.

In 2213, war broke out in central Africa, among what one British political theorist had termed the “gamma states” at the end of the Third World War.1 Throughout the region, victims of poverty and famine revolted against their respective governments in a series of popular rebellions that claimed nearly 200,000 lives and were punctuated by the horrific bombing of the American embassy in Kinshasa. The American and South African governments immediately denounced the attacks as acts of terrorism. But while South Africa verbally supported the gamma governments while attempting to negotiate with the rebels, the United States deployed 200,000 troops to Kinshasa overnight, as well as an additional 500,000 to the rest of the region. Leaders of the powerful Islamic bloc in western Asia and northern Africa, the so-called “beta states,” condemned this rapid military escalation as yet another example of overbearing American imperialism. In response, the beta governments began the covert delivery of weapons manufactured in the “mini-beta” Islamic states of Southeast Asia to the African rebels. Over the next several months, the militaries of the gamma states (aided by the Americans) and the African rebels fought pitched battles throughout central Africa, with little direct intervention from the world’s other nations.

But in early 2214, a Japanese intelligence report found that the beta states had started to send their own generals to Africa to lead the revolts. South African intelligence later confirmed these reports and recorded footage of one such general ordering his troops to use XR nerve gas, a lethal chemical weapon, against the civilian population of a city still loyal to its national government. The news galvanized the remaining allies of the United States, the so-called “alpha states,” into joining the war. Japan, the United Kingdom and South Africa all declared war in February (against whom they declared war remains unclear since every battle of the conflict was fought in Africa), and Germany, France, Russia, Mexico and Brazil joined their allies in the following months. The beta states, most significantly Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, declared war on the United States around the same time (and later against the other alpha states); the mini-betas, led by India, soon joined their allies in the effort. World War IV had begun.

Detailed descriptions of the battles and stratagems of the war are superfluous to this account, but suffice it to say the war lasted for eleven years and claimed 289 million lives. Of those 289 million, 53 million were soldiers of the alpha states, 44 million were from beta militaries and 192 million were civilians—almost all of them African. The combatants set off two pure fusion bombs, with payloads of 84 and 96 kilotons. To this day, it remains unknown which side detonated these weapons, as both accused the other of doing so. By 2219, the African nations on whose land the war had been waged were begging for peace, desperate to accept almost any terms proposed. Sadly, these nations played little part in the war aside from being the primary suppliers of its victims. In 2221, South Africa, the leader of the African Union and a prominent member of the alliance of alpha states, withdrew its soldiers from the battle front. The next year, its government condemned the war as “the worst atrocity committed by humankind against humankind in the history of this Earth.” But still the war raged on for two more years.

Finally, in May 2224, the United Kingdom exited the arena, its army reduced to 300,000 soldiers. Algeria, Turkey, Brazil, Mexico and France followed suit later that month. On July 4, the United States declared victory and pulled the ragged remnants of its former military might out of Africa. The rest of the alpha states did the same. The next day, the beta states also declared victory and exited the region. There were no relief efforts, no promises of international aid and no apologies whatsoever to the citizens of the African nations who had endured the greatest suffering throughout the war.

But Earth was a dying world, and Africa was merely the first casualty, no matter how hard the other five continents tried to ignore that fact. She had been dying for four billion years, from the moment the first microbe appeared in her oceans and began the gradual sapping of her resources. She had watched at first with amusement, then awe, then horror, as humans appeared, rising from hunched and innocent primates to stand erect on two legs, craning their necks like newly awoken monsters of Frankenstein and gazing greedily and immodestly over her flesh, then spreading, digging, cutting, poisoning and eating away at her body like some rabid cancer. By the 20th century she had lapsed into a coma, after more than 200 years of noxious coal fumes choked the once-pure breath from her body. One hundred years later, she gave no indication she would ever recover.

In 1900, the average temperature on Earth was 4.5 °C. By 2000, it had increased to 5.3 °C as the phenomenon of global warming began to take effect. Over the next 200 years, Earth’s temperature rose at increasingly greater rates, reaching 6.4 °C in 2100 and 7.6 °C in 2200. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, believed by most climatologists to be a primary cause of global warming, soared from about 280 parts per million (ppm) prior to the 19th century to 380 ppm by 2000. By 2100, these levels had reached 620 ppm; by 2200, they had increased to 1120 ppm. As the Earth warmed, glaciers and polar ice caps melted and caused the seas to rise. They had risen steadily by 0.1-0.2 millimeters per year since 1000 B.C.E., but from 1900 until 2000, they rose an estimated 1-2 millimeters each year. They rose 300 millimeters by 2100 and an additional 400 by 2200. During this time, Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Mumbai, Jakarta, Dhaka and New Orleans, as well as several other low-lying regions, were completely flooded. The seas also claimed parts of New York, Los Angeles, Cairo, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai and Tokyo before dams could be built to stem the rising tides.

Irregularities and extremes in global weather patterns accompanied the increases in temperatures. Droughts became more frequent, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, but also in more densely populated regions, such as the areas surrounding Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Melbourne, Mexico City, São Paulo, Stockholm, Vienna and Moscow. The droughts often kindled violent wildfires, such as the 2189 blaze that decimated more than 10% of Los Angeles. At the same time, tropical storms and hurricanes also increased in number and intensity, and between 2050 and 2200, the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane struck Los Angeles, Miami, Mumbai, Sydney, Seoul and Tokyo at least once. Repeated onslaughts of tsunamis, tropical storms and hurricanes destroyed Bermuda, the Virgin Islands and several small islands in the Philippines and Japan. Yet these catastrophes were not limited to human beings and their empires of wood, mortar and steel. In those same 150 years, 100,000 different species of plants and animals went extinct, among them bald eagles, blue whales, right whales, leatherback turtles, black rhinoceroses, Asian elephants, zebras, gorillas, California condors, jaguars, tigers, orangutans and giant pandas. Gone too were 132 species of frogs, 37 species of toads, 28 species of salamanders, 73 species of turtles, 14 species of parrots, 6 species of salmon, 59 species of mice, 148 species of rats, 60 species of shrews, 155 species of bats and more than 75,000 species of plants.

Yet humans, far more adaptive and ingenious than any virus, long postponed the inevitable. The major damage had been perpetrated in the years before 2030. Thereafter, the human race devoted itself to saving its planet. Between the years 2030 and 2040 the United States reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by over 15% of its total from the previous decade. New technologies increased the efficiency of previous methods of energy production, and by 2047, 45% of all carbon dioxide emitted by power plants was captured and stored deep underground. In 2062, a Saudi Arabian physicist, Dr. Alim al Muwaffaq, unlocked the secret to power generation via nuclear fusion. In 2065, his countrymen built the world’s first fusion power plant. Ten more were built throughout the world over the next two years, and by 2078 there were 5,000 operational fusion plants worldwide.

In 2036, a South Korean automaker, Kwang Automotives, developed the first compressed air engine automobile having a range of over 2000 miles. By 2040, the company had sold 500 million of these cars. At mid-century, 85% of all cars in the world used some sort of non-petroleum fuel source. A completely petroleum-free commercial airplane, the Vesper VII, flew across the Atlantic Ocean in 2098, powered by compressed air and solar and hydrogen-based energy. A decade later, a revamped Vesper carried passengers from Los Angeles to Sydney. By 2147, 35% of all commercial airplanes were powered entirely by non-fossil fuels.

Yet despite their countless innovations, humans remained powerless to alter one basic fact: they could not make their world any larger. And this was the unassailable quandary that faced humanity in the 21st and 22nd centuries. Without their countless innovations, the human population would have almost certainly dwindled in number as a result of war, disease and self-pollution. In time, perhaps only the best and brightest of the species would have remained, those capable of caring for themselves and their precious habitat. But in providing new solutions to every problem facing them, the thinkers of the race, the scientists, doctors and inventors, successfully thwarted the law of the jungle, at least temporarily. Cures for disease and stop-losses for global warming meant a better, healthier environment, and as a result, the human race thrived. The population boomed, but this growth only meant less food and more pollution. While global warming might have culled human population to a sustainable level, stalling global warming meant more humans, more greenhouse gases, fewer resources, more wars and even more global warming.

The only solution for humankind was to expand its empire, and that meant finding another habitable planet and the technology to reach it. In 2054, Japan announced that its scientists had designed and built a spaceship capable of transporting human beings to Mars. The Japanese attempted a manned mission in 2056, but the ship’s navigational system malfunctioned one-third of the way into the journey, forcing a return to Earth. A second mission in 2059 also failed. However, in 2061, a team of American, British and Japanese astronauts aboard Mars Odyssey III successfully landed on the red planet. The journey took three months from Earth to Mars, and the astronauts spent two days exploring the planet’s surface before returning home. Buoyed by the success of this mission, a team of private investors from the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Russia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Iran pooled their considerable resources to found Space Exploration for Sustained Human Life (SESHL, more commonly referred to as Seashell). As its name suggested, Seashell investors possessed the single-minded goal of finding a hospitable planet to serve as a new home for humankind.

After decades of exploratory dead ends, Seashell-funded scientists announced in 2092 that they had discovered an Earth-like planet approximately sixteen light-years from Earth. This planet, later named Pearl, was believed to be rocky, about half the size of Earth, and potentially bearing surface water. It orbited a dim red star comparable to the Earth’s sun, called Falder 347, with a mean orbital radius of 56 million kilometers. The only problem, assuming Pearl was capable of sustaining life, was how to get there. In 2101, Seashell scientists built a satellite, Pearl I, to attempt a voyage to that distant world. The satellite was powered by a modified version of the Bussard ramjet prototype, renamed the Petrov ramjet after its designer, the Russian aeronautical engineer Dr. Ilya Petrov. The Petrov ramjet was driven by a fusion rocket capable of propelling the satellite at 70% light speed. The massive quantity of fuel necessary for this sustained fusion reaction could not be carried on board the satellite but instead was gathered in the form of hydrogen gas from the interstellar medium by a series of electro-magnetic fields, 50 kilometers in diameter. These magnetic fields collected and compressed the hydrogen to generate a thermonuclear-fusion reaction, then directed the energy of that reaction opposite to the intended direction of travel to produce the forward acceleration of the ramjet.

However, when collected while the ramjet traveled against the stellar winds, these hydrogen ions created a significant drag force equal to the mass of ions collected per second multiplied by the velocity of the ions as propelled by the winds, estimated to be about 500,000 meters per second. Seashell scientists decided Pearl I could not travel in a straight line, but instead would have to maneuver like a sailboat, tacking back and forth to either reduce drag force or maximize the effect of tailwinds. By traveling straight ahead at its maximum velocity of 70% light speed, Pearl I could have reached its destination in just under twenty-three years. Yet given the problem of stellar winds, the satellite would require an onboard navigational system to direct the craft in relation to wind patterns. Accounting for these course adjustments, Seashell estimated it might take up to 60 years to reach Pearl. Nevertheless, Pearl I was launched on January 1, 2103.

While they waited for their satellite to arrive at its destination, Seashell worked to improve the ramjet design, launching a new prototype satellite every five years from 2103 to 2143. In 2146, Seashell announced that Pearl II had crashed on Pearl, but its video equipment had been damaged and no images of the planet were available. Two more satellites were launched in 2148 and 2153, and in 2157 Pearl IV successfully completed an orbit of the planet. Video confirmed what Seashell had believed all along: Pearl, indeed, seemed capable of supporting human life.

Further verification came courtesy of video from Pearl VII in 2160 and Pearl IX in 2164, convincing Seashell the time had come for the first manned mission to Pearl. The organization launched the generation ship Pearl Voyager I in 2170. The Voyager carried four devoted Seashell astronauts and their spouses, all of them committed to conceiving and rearing children to carry on the mission in their stead. Unfortunately its communication systems failed ten years into the journey and the ship was lost forever. Pearl Voyager II was launched in 2184, but mechanical failures forced it to return to Earth in 2199. Growing impatient, Seashell launched a third manned mission in 2191, while Voyager II was still en route, and in 2225, the astronauts aboard Pearl Voyager III became the first humans to orbit Pearl.

The next logical step would have been an attempt to land a manned spacecraft on the planet, but World War IV had given the Seashell investors reason to doubt the future viability of Earth as a cradle of human life. By the time Voyager III completed its orbit, Seashell had already drafted plans for a colony on Pearl. Over the next two years, 56 manned Voyager ships were sent to Pearl to erect the colony’s foundations, while Seashell undertook the construction of a massive generation ship, a ramjet-powered spacecraft capable of transporting thousands of people to Pearl. New designs had improved upon the aerodynamics of the old ramjet model, allowing for speeds of up to 90% light speed, but a generation ship the size of the Pearl Colonizer, with magnetic fields approximately 1,000 kilometers in diameter, was expected to travel much slower. Those astronauts who left Earth on the Colonizer would not survive the journey and the mission would have to be carried out by their descendants.

Seashell completed construction of the Colonizer in 2235 and launched the ship on December 31 of that year. Excluding the enormous magnetic fields, her body was 70 meters wide, 400 meters long and 70 meters high. She carried 3,245 human passengers and crew from all over the globe, 100 embryos of 20 species of livestock, and had a greenhouse with artificial sunlight capable of growing enough food to sustain 5,000 people for 200 years.

Seventeen years into the voyage, an estimated one-fifth the total distance to Pearl, the Colonizer lost contact with Seashell headquarters on Earth. The crew contemplated turning back but decided against it, fearing the worst had happened to their comrades back home. On June 21, 2325 the Colonizer landed on Pearl.

1 World War III (2139-2147) began in India with the mass uprising of the minority Muslim population on February 2, 2139, the date on which Indian Muslims celebrated their religious holiday Laylat-al-Qadr, or “the Night of Power.” Religious civil war erupted throughout the country, and within a few months international allies of both the Hindu and Muslim factions joined the fray. The war spread into the Middle East and northern Africa and ended in a relative stalemate eight years later with the Muslim bloc ascending to political control in India and lasting international alliances having been drawn along religious and ideological lines.

About the Author

Greg Hickey was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1985. After graduating from Pomona College in 2008, he played and coached baseball in Sweden and South Africa. He is now a forensic scientist, endurance athlete and award-winning writer. He lives in Chicago with his wife, Lindsay.