Wool

by Hugh Howey

Page 39

 

  Knox lifted his boots from one step to another, thinking on these things. Had he become the bad people he’d learned about in youth? Or had he been lied to? It hurt his head to consider, but here he was, leading a recreation of something awful. And yet it felt so right. So necessary. What if that former clash had felt the same? Had felt the same in the breasts of the men and women who’d waged it?

  19

  “Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low,

  As one dead in the bottom of a tomb. ”

  “It would take ten lifetimes to read all these. ”

  Juliette looked up from the pile of scattered tins and stacks of thick books. There was more to marvel at in their text-heavy pages than in any of the children’s books of her youth.

  Solo turned from the stove where he was heating soup and boiling water. He waved a dripping metal spoon at the scattered mess she’d made. “I don’t think they were meant to be read,” he told her. “At least, not like I’ve been reading them, front to back. ” He touched his tongue to the spoon, then stuck it back in the pot and stirred. “Everything’s out of order. It’s more like a backup to the backup. ”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Juliette admitted. She looked down at her lap where pictures of animals called “butterflies” filled the pages. Their wings were comically bright. She wondered if they were the size of her hands or the size of people. She had yet to find any sense of scale for the beasts.

  “The servers,” Solo said. “What did you think I meant? The backup. ”

  He sounded flustered. Juliette watched him busy about the stove, his movements jerky and manic, and realized she was the one cloistered away and ignorant, not him. He had all these books, decades of reading history, the company of ancestors she could only imagine. What did she have as her experience? A life in a dark hole with thousands of fellow, ignorant savages?

  She tried to remember this as she watched him dig a finger in his ear and then inspect his fingernail.

  “The backup of what exactly?” she finally asked, almost afraid of the cryptic answers to come.

  Solo found two bowls. He began wiping one out with the fabric in the belly of his coveralls. “The backup of everything,” he said. “All that we know. All that ever was. ” He set the bowls down and adjusted a knob on the stove. “Follow me,” he said, waving his arm. “I’ll show you. ”

  Juliette closed the book and slotted it into its tin. She rose and followed Solo out of the room and into the next one.

  “Don’t mind the mess,” he said, gesturing at a small hill of trash and debris piled up against one wall. It looked like a thousand empty cans of food, and smelled like ten thousand. Juliette wrinkled her nose and fought the reflex to gag. Solo seemed unaffected. He stood beside a small wooden desk and flipped through diagrams hanging from the wall on enormous sheets of paper.

  “Where’s the one I want?” he wondered aloud.

  “What are these?” Juliette asked, entranced. She saw one that looked like a schematic of the silo, but unlike any they’d had in Mechanical.

  Solo turned. He had several sheets flopped over one shoulder, his body practically disappearing between the layers of them. “Maps,” he said. “I want to show you how much is out there. You’ll shit yourself. ”

  He shook his head and muttered something to himself. “Sorry, didn’t mean to say that. ”

  Juliette told him it was fine. She held the back of her hand to her nose, the stench of rotting food intolerable.

  “Here it is. Hold this end. ” Solo held out the corner of a half dozen sheets of paper. He took the other side and they lifted them away from the wall. Juliette felt like pointing out the grommets at the bottom of the maps and how there were probably sticks or hooks around here somewhere for propping them up, but held her tongue. Opening her mouth just made the smell of the rotting cans worse.

  “This is us,” Solo said. He pointed to a spot on the paper. Dark, squiggly lines were everywhere. It didn’t look like a map or schematic of anything Juliette had ever seen. It looked like children had drawn it. Hardly a straight line existed anywhere.

  “What’s this supposed to show?” she asked.

  “Borders. Land!” Solo ran his hands over one uninterrupted shape that took up nearly a third of the drawing. “This is all water,” he told her.

  “Where?” Juliette’s arm was getting tired of holding up her end of the sheet. The smell and the riddles were getting to her. She felt a long way from home. The thrill of survival was in danger of being replaced with the depression of a long and miserable existence looming for years and years before her.

  “Out there! Covering the land. ” Solo pointed vaguely at the walls. He narrowed his eyes at Juliette’s confusion. “The silo, this silo, would be as big around as a single hair on your head. ” He patted the map. “Right here. All of them. Maybe all of us left. No bigger than my thumb. ” He placed a finger in a knot of lines. Juliette thought he seemed so sincere. She leaned closer to see better, but he pushed her back.

  “Let those go,” he said. He slapped at her hand holding the corners of paper. He smoothed the maps against the wall. “This is us. ” He indicated one of the circles on the top sheet. Juliette eyeballed the columns and rows, figured there were four dozen or so of them. “Silo seventeen. ” He slid his hand up. “Number twelve. This is eight. And silo one up here. ”

  “No. ”

  Juliette shook her head and reached for the desk, her legs weak.

  “Yes. Silo one. You’re probably from sixteen or eighteen. Do you remember how far you walked?”

  She grabbed the small chair and pulled it out. Sat down heavily.

  “How many hills did you cross?”

  Juliette didn’t answer. She was thinking about the other map and comparing the scales. What if Solo was right? What if there were fifty or so silos and all of them could be covered by a thumb? What if Lukas had been right about how far away the stars were? She needed something to crawl inside, something to cover her. She needed some sleep.

  “I once heard from silo one,” Solo said. “A long time ago. Not sure how well any of these others are doing—”

  “Wait. ” Juliette sat up straight. “What do you mean, you heard from them?”

  Solo didn’t turn from the map. He ran his hands from one circle to another, a childlike expression on his face. “They called. Checking in. ” He looked away from the map and her, toward the far corner of the room. “We didn’t talk for long. I didn’t know all the procedures. They weren’t happy. ”

  “Okay, but how did you do this? Can we call someone now? Was it a radio? Did it have a little antenna, a small black pointy thing—” Juliette stood and crossed to him, grabbed his shoulder and turned him around. How much did this man know that could help her but that she couldn’t get out of him? “Solo, how did you talk to them?”

  “Through the wire,” he said. He cupped his hands and covered his ears with them. “You just talk in it. ”

  “You need to show me,” she said.

  Solo shrugged. He flipped up a few of the maps again, found the one he wanted and pressed the others against the wall. It was the schematic of the silo she had seen earlier, a side-on view of it divided into thirds, each third side by side. She helped him hold the other sheets out of the way.

  “Here are the wires. They run every which way. ” He traced thick branches of lines that ran from the exterior walls and off the edges of the paper. They were labeled with minuscule print. Juliette leaned closer to read; she recognized many of the engineering marks.

  “These are for power,” she said, pointing at the lines with the jagged symbols above them.

  “Yup. ” Solo nodded. “We don’t get our own power anymore. Borrow it from others, I think. All automatic. ”

  “You get it from others?” Juliette felt her frustration rise. How many crucial things did this man know that he considered trifling
? “Anything else you want to add?” she asked him. “Do you have a flying suit that can whisk me back to my silo? Or are there secret passages beneath all the floors so we can just stroll there as easy as we like?”

  Solo laughed and looked at her like she was crazy. “No,” he said. “Then it would be one seed, not many. One bad day would ruin us all. Besides, the diggers are dead. They buried them. ” He pointed at a nook, a rectangular room jutting off from the edge of Mechanical. Juliette peered closer. She recognized every floor of the down deep at a glance, but this room wasn’t supposed to exist.

  “What do you mean, the diggers?”

  “The machines that removed the dirt. You know, that made this place. ” He ran his hand down the length of the silo. “Too heavy to move, I guess, so they poured the walls right over them. ”

  “Do they work?” Juliette asked. An idea formed. She thought of the mines, of how she’d helped excavate rock by hand. She thought of the sort of machine that could dig out an entire silo, wondered if it could be used to dig between them.

  Solo clicked his tongue. “No way. Nothing down there does. All toast. Besides—” he chopped his hand partway up the down deep. “There’s flooding up to—” He turned to Juliette. “Wait. Are you wanting out? To go somewhere?” He shook his head in disbelief.

  “I want to go home,” Juliette said.

  His eyes widened. “Why would you go back? They sent you away, didn’t they? You’ll stay here. We don’t want to leave. ” He scratched his beard and shook his head side to side.

  “Someone has to know about all of this,” Juliette told him. “All these other people out there. All that space beyond. The people in my silo need to know. ”

  “People in your silo already do,” he said.

  He studied her quizzically, and it dawned on Juliette that he was right. She pictured where they currently stood in this silo. They were in the heart of IT, deep inside the fortress room of the mythical servers, below the servers in a hidden passage, hidden probably even from the people who had access to the innermost kernels of the silo’s mysteries.

  Someone in her own silo did know. He had helped keep these secrets for generations. Had decided, alone and without input from anyone, what they should and should not know. It was the same man who had sent Juliette to her death, a man who had killed who knew how many more—

  “Tell me about these wires,” Juliette said. “How did you talk to the other silo? Give me every detail. ”

  “Why?” Solo asked, seemingly shrinking before her. His eyes were wet with fear.

  “Because,” she said. “I have someone I very much wish to call. ”

  20

  “This day’s black fate on more days doth depend:

  This but begins the woe others must end. ”

  The waiting was interminable. It was the long silence of itchy scalps and trickling sweat, the discomfort of weight on elbows, of backs bent, of bellies flat against an unforgiving conference table. Lukas peered down the length of his fearsome rifle and through the conference room’s shattered glass window. Little fragment jewels remained in the side of the jamb like transparent teeth. Lukas could still hear, ringing in his ears, the incredible bang from Sims’s gun that had taken out the glass. He could still smell the acrid scent of gunpowder in the air, the looks of worry on the faces of the other techs. The destruction had seemed so unnecessary. All this preparation, the toting of massive black guns out of storage, the interruption of his talk with Bernard, news of people coming from the down deep, it all made little sense.

  He checked the slide on the side of the rifle and tried to remember the five minutes of instruction he’d been given hours earlier. There was a round in the chamber. The gun was cocked. More bullets waited patiently in the clip.

  And the boys in security gave him a hard time for his tech jargon. Lukas’s vocabulary had exploded with new terms. He thought about the rooms beneath the servers, the pages and pages of the Order, the rows of books he’d only gotten a glimpse of. His mind sagged under the weight of it all.

  He spent another minute practicing his sighting, looking down the barrel and lining up the small cross in the tiny circle. He aimed at the cluster of conference chairs that had been rolled into an obstructing jumble by the door. For all he knew, they would be waiting like this for days and nothing would ever happen. It had been a while since any porter had brought an update on what was going on below.

  For practice, he gently slid his finger into the guard and against the trigger. He tried to get comfortable with the idea of pulling that lever, of fighting the upward kick Sims had told them to expect.

  Bobbie Milner—a shadow no more than sixteen—made a joke beside him, and Sims told them both to shut the fuck up. Lukas didn’t protest being included in the admonishment. He glanced over at the security gate where a bristle of black barrels poked through the stanchions and over the metal duty desk. Peter Billings, the new silo sheriff, was over there fiddling with his small gun. Bernard stood behind the sheriff, doling out instructions to his men. Bobbie Milner shifted his weight beside Lukas and grunted, trying to get more comfortable.

  Waiting. More waiting. They were all waiting.

  Of course, had Lukas known what was coming, he wouldn’t have minded.

  He would’ve begged to wait there forever.

  • • • •

  Knox led his group through the sixties with just a few stops for water, a pause to secure their packs and tighten their laces. They passed several curious porters with overnight deliveries who prodded for details about where they were heading, about the blackouts. Each porter left unhappy. And hopefully, empty headed.