by Platt, Sean
Mara looked confused. “Like what?”
“Everyone is forgetting things they used to know. The Astrals know it’s happening. It’s what they want. It’s what has to happen, I think, before they can leave.”
“They’re going to leave? Is that something you can hear them saying?”
Clara sighed. They’d had this discussion many times.
“Yes, but it’s also been broadcast to the world. On the tablets. You don’t remember?”
Mara shook her head.
“They’re not done with us. I think they need to get us down to a certain number before they leave and let us start over. But I think there’s something else that has to happen before they can go. I think they need to wipe us clean. They don’t want us to remember what happened when they were here or what came before, so we can restart with a blank slate.”
“Oh.”
“But at the same time, when I close my eyes and look deep inside, it’s like I see lights. Same for a lot of the kids, and not even the ones like me. Something is growing while something else is going away. Do you know what I mean?”
Mara took a long second to think then shook her head with what looked like resignation.
“Try it. Now, please.”
Mara shut her eyes.
“Just look deep. Breathe slowly. Shut everything out, and look into the darkness. Let me know if you see anything there, or feel it.”
“What would I see or feel?”
“Anything.”
Mara sat and closed her eyes, inhaled and exhaled, then finally opened her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
Clara put her hand atop Mara’s, which was resting on her knee, and gave the viceroy a grim little smile — and then, on instinct, a spontaneous hug. She finished, stood, and looked down at the viceroy. Clara felt as if she were the adult and Mara a child, waiting for whatever came next.
“It’ll be over soon,” Clara said. “One way or another.”
Clara left the bridge, returning to her bunk.
When she was gone, Mara touched the sleeve of a tall and authoritative woman passing by and said, “Do you know who that little girl was?”
Chapter Forty-Eight
A hand on Liza’s shoulder suddenly woke her. She bolted upright from what seemed to have been a slouched position, remembering all at once that she wasn’t in her quarters. She was right on the bridge, napping in a chair in front of everyone. But as far as Liza saw, nobody cared that the viceroy was asleep (literally) at the switch. None of the people milling purposelessly through the room was paying her any mind. And why would they? A ship without a destination was like a person without a reason to live. Every day was the same: water, meager food, and the reek of confined human bodies.
Liza followed the arm, still on her shoulder, to its source. She saw a man with stubble thick and dark enough to merit werewolf jokes. Mick. He looked as exhausted as she felt. His eyes were baggier than his age, slightly red. His bearing was mostly the same as always, but to Liza it seemed more effort was being expended to maintain — lack of shaving notwithstanding.
“Bad dream, Liza?” he asked, watching her settle from the surprise he’d given her.
“No. I don’t dream.”
“I almost wish I didn’t. I don’t suppose you remember an old comedian named Mitch Hedberg?”
Liza shook her head.
“He had this bit about how he didn’t like dreaming because dreaming is work. ‘I’m in my soft bed, relaxing, and now all of a sudden I have to build a go-kart with my ex-landlord.’”
Liza laughed. Mick laughed for a few beats, then his face withered.
“It’s funny. I don’t remember where I lived three weeks ago, but I remembered that. I could give you more if you want. Strange how it’s all happening. When I’m not horrified at what’s happening, I’m fascinated. It’s like standing beside a grand old building, watching the walls fall in.”
“You remembered my name,” Liza said, knowing how pathetic it must sound. “You said it just now, when you woke me up.”
Mick gave her a grim little smile. Then he held out his arm and rolled it so she could see the pale underside. In ballpoint pen he’d written himself a reminder: VICEROY LIZA KNIGHT.
“If I decide to take a shower and don’t remember you afterward, you can’t take it personally.”
“Maybe you’ll forget to take showers.” Liza wished she could call the words back as they left her mouth. She’d been trying to play along, but that was too harsh.
“What do you need, Mick?”
He stood for moments. Then sat.
“Shit. I don’t know.”
“I asked you for a population report. Was that it?”
“Yes. That’s it.” He reached into his pocket and retrieved a scrap of crumpled paper. “We have to take the Astrals’ word for it because they’re the only ones broadcasting, but apparently there was a massive plague in a colony of North African survivors. And a group in Switzerland, up in the Alps. On the Jungfrau. They came up from—”
“You already told me who they are. Did something happen to them?”
“They’re all dead.”
“How?”
“Locusts, if you can believe it.”
“Were they farming?”
Mick glanced at his cheat sheet, which made crinkling sounds as he ran his thumbs and fingers along it. “According to what I saw, the locusts didn’t eat their crops. They …” He stopped, apparently appalled by something he himself had written five minutes earlier.
“They what?”
“I guess the locusts swarmed them. The people.”
“How do locusts kill people?”
“I’m not sure I want to know.” Mick folded the paper and returned it to his pocket, looking disturbed.
“Where did they come from, anyway? We’ve seen this story before, right?” She gestured around the bridge, indicating “this story” to mean the entirety of their current existence, the flood, everything. “Noah loaded up with two of every animal. We have a few dogs and possibly some lice. So what happens with the world’s animals? Did the Astrals take care of it somehow, or are we going to be alone this time, then die off because there’s zero biodiversity?”
Mick was looking at her, not really hearing the question.
“What?”
“Is Noah a story?”
“Noah’s Ark,” Liza said.
“How do you remember it?”
“You remembered Mitch Humbug.”
“Hedberg.”
“See?”
“It’s hardly the same. You don’t forget my name. You don’t have it written on your arm. You keep referring to the way things were, casually mentioning things I get the feeling I’m supposed to remember but don’t. And you know stuff like Noah and his animals.”
“But I don’t dream.”
She said it offhandedly, but Mick seemed to think it over, his head bobbing in thought.
“I get the feeling something fucked up is happening, Liza. I don’t like it.”
“It’s hard to get much more fucked up than global elimination. I think your feelings are normal.”
“It’s more than that. The guys in my bunk room say they’re having the same dream. Every night, like a premonition.”
“What’s it about?”
“A group of people in the desert.” His lips pursed. “I think one of them is you.”
“Me?”
“You and six others. Or maybe seven.”
“Are they all people you work intimately with and have an excuse for being in your subconscious?”
“I don’t recognize the others. At least, I don’t think I do. They’re all men except for you. Plus a girl.”
“Maybe it’s not a girl. Maybe it’s just a really, really short person.”
Mick gave her a look. “I’m serious about this, Liza. I’ve been meaning to say something about it to you for a while.”
“Why? It’s just a dream, Mick.”
“It feel
s like more than that. And there’s … an importance that goes with it. Like, I feel that this matters a lot. Or like I’ve been waiting for it.”
“So it’s in the future. Your prophetic dream.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Like you’re a wizard.”
“I know how it sounds.”
“Well,” Liza said, not contradicting the notion though it sounded plenty ridiculous, “at least we know we’ll find land again. Me and my buddies.”
“Did we discuss that already? I feel like we talked about land.”
“Promises, promises. Yes, we talked about it. I’ve had bulletins, presumably from Divinity, same as the population reports.”
“Funny thing about that,” Mick said, pulling the paper back from his pocket as if trying to recall something. “I don’t actually think those are broadcast reports. The geeks think they’re reports coming directly to us from one of the motherships, out of sight, maybe bounced off a satellite or something. Maybe being sent only to us.”
“So what?”
“So maybe they’re fucking with us. Still.”
“I guess we’ll find out in …” Liza leaned forward, flipped a calendar’s pages. It was ten years old; she’d found it in a pile. The date didn’t matter. Only the number of boxes passed. “Nineteen days,” she finished.
“What happens in nineteen days?”
“Supposedly, the oceans retreat. That’s when the Astrals say we’ll find land. Real land, not a mountain peak. So I guess we’ll see if your Nostradamus dreams were right.” She leaned back. “Then all I’ll need is a desert, a little girl, and a bunch of men.”
Mick looked like he might chastise her again for not taking him seriously. Liza felt annoyed by it all. She was still the fucking viceroy and he was still her employee, underling, go-fer, whatever. The entire ship was stir-crazy. Only Liza was holding her marbles. They’d be lucky to survive nineteen more days without a killing, cannibalism, or both.
“Relax, Mick. This is all just …” She waved her hands, trying to convey a general sense of undefined fuckery. “You know. But we have to hang in there for another three weeks. Less than that, unless I’m being lied to. Then they’ll be done with us. They’ll pull the floods back, maybe plop the animals down from wherever, then do you know what they’ll do?”
“What?”
“They’ll leave, Mick. The Astrals will pack up their ships and go the fuck home. And the few of us left will have the planet to ourselves. And that’s not just me believing what they tell me. That’s what Jabari’s think tank said, too. Each time around, the aliens have advanced our societies, killed us off, then left. Anything else is Future Earth’s problem.”
Mick looked unsure. But she could tell the idea of an Astral departure was extremely appealing. Light at the end of an endless tunnel. They’d talked about this already, of course, but Mick’s mind was a sieve. Too much confinement. Too much fear and upheaval. The brain could only take so much, and not everyone had the mental strength that Liza herself had, to weather it all intact.
“Look,” she said. “Everyone’s nerves are thin. You’re all feeding on each other’s paranoia. You want to feel better? You want to think better? You want to sleep better? Maybe get out of that bunk room. Sleep up here if you want. I have plenty of space.”
“Maybe things should go the other way. Maybe it’d be better if you left this place every once in a while. People are starting to talk. They wonder about you. You’re up here all the time, never interacting, never leaving your hole. You’ve got your guards. I’ve even seen things. Like how you get paranoid whenever you’re near the controls. You won’t let me come close.”
“Hmm. Let’s compare tactics, shall we? I’d say I’m doing just fine in my Howard Hughes existence. I could draw you a detailed map of Roman Sands. But you? You’re all going batshit crazy.”
It was cruel, and for a second Liza thought he might call her on it. Instead he fixed her with a dumb, animal stare. “Howard who?”
“Never mind. Was there anything else, Mick?”
His eyes moved upward, brain fruitlessly searching for recall.
“Guess not. There’s that superior ‘interaction paradigm’ at work again.”
Mick glared for a moment, then left. Fine with Liza; she’d had more than enough of Mick. Just like she’d had more than enough of the others on the bridge, who wandered around like lost assholes, pestered her for empty reassurance, and generally looked at her when she checked on the navigation like she — not they — was the crazy one.
Liza picked up the small bag she kept tucked under her chair, its long strap always securely around her arm. She removed the silver ball, looked at her reflection in its mirrored surface, then set it aside.
The small metal canister was still in the bag’s bottom. She sighed, looking at it. So much for Canned Heat. So much for cracking open the rebel viceroy’s secret little club, letting the Astrals listen in on their whispers, paving the path for her competition’s elimination and ensuring Liza’s place at the head of the post-apocalypse pack.
If the viceroys couldn’t meet, that chance to find Astral grace was out the window.
She set the canister aside and again held the ball.
If she did what it told her, there were many more chances to come.
Liza closed her eyes. Tried to imagine the dream the others were having, wondering if she could force herself to join. But instead of seeing people in a desert like Mick described, she saw a stark white room. She saw a woman with a backbone as rigid as a steel rod. She remembered distant, unarticulated pain. She remembered a far-off, vaguely troubling sense of isolation.
Liza’s eyes opened. She went to the vessel’s navigation system, glancing over her shoulder for watchers as she went, then made a tiny adjustment.
She didn’t know where the ship was going any more than the others did.
Liza gripped the ball, feeling its intelligence, knowing only that no matter what, they had to get there.
Chapter Forty-Nine
There was no way to track time in the mammoth ship’s all-white room, so Sadeem metered moments by the cycles that seemed part of his routine, then used a sharp edge on his zipper to score a line into a discrete spot on his arm. By this count, twenty-five days had passed since the flood.
There was a meal of human breakfast food, a meal of human lunch food, and a meal of human dinner-type food. Eternity came in to speak with him several times each day, at roughly the same intervals. Sometime after the dinner meal, there was a long period during which Sadeem assumed he was supposed to sleep, and did, on a large pillow left on the floor like a dog’s bed. Days passed, and he he grew increasingly used to it all.
Each day, Eternity would show him sights of the world below. It was never clear if the ship had hovered above the spots she showed or if they’d been broadcast, but a total lack of motion meant it could be either.
Sadeem saw fires, floods, and manual destruction, when the Astrals discovered a pocket of humans in one place and had a mothership handy.
Big waves, stirred from an otherwise calm ocean, sent to drown settlements.
Where there were still volcanoes above water, he saw eruptions. Dust clouds. Burnings.
There were many storms of all types. Eternity showed Sadeem visions of people swallowed by tornadoes, flattened by debris in hurricanes, drowned in flash floods in the few areas of remaining high land, even people struck by curiously abundant lightning. In areas frozen by the Astrals, blizzards froze people to death. Subzero winds suffocated the marooned, usually in warm-weather clothes.
Ice ages were localized, as if created by an enormous focused freeze ray.
Pestilence. Disease. There were illnesses on Eternity’s Death Of Humanity program that Sadeem had never seen. Which diseases made people bleed from the eyes? Made them shit blood as if from a faucet? It was a macabre playground where masochistic alien scientists could invent beautiful horrors that, in the pre-apocalypse world, woul
dn’t even have made logical sense.
And each day, Eternity gave Sadeem a number.
Fifty million.
Forty-two million.
Thirty-seven million.
Each day, the number fell. Some days by a lot. On the third week Sadeem realized she’d never told him what the number was. But from context, its meaning was clear. The number never rose. That would be for after the Astrals finished their pruning and finally left the planet alone, when the time came for humans to become fruitful and multiply.
Each day, Eternity asked Sadeem about the man in boots, the man who called himself Stranger. It had become perfunctory. Sadeem had told her dozens of times that he knew nothing of the man, and it’s not like he ever left to discover more. But whoever the man was, he seemed to have stayed hidden from the Astrals, his dangerous secrets still unrevealed.
So afterward, Eternity would turn to ask Sadeem about the Lightborn children.
What are their abilities?
What caused them to form?
Why do you present them with puzzles?
How are their brains different from yours?
Sadeem answered for as long as he could then finally turned it back on Eternity.
You want to know so damn bad, why don’t you go down and grab one?
Then Eternity would ask more about puzzles. Make plans for the new Temple’s location. And she’d teach Sadeem more, and more, and more of what he’d need to know if he was to be the first new Mullah Elder.
His mind turned inward. Comparing new information with old. Sprinkling in what he’d learned from Clara Gupta.
Eternity was supposed to know everything. And yet for some reason, judging by her actions, he was the sage.
A scant few days following the big storms, Mara Jabari forgot they’d ever happened. Clara considered telling her, along with anyone who’d listen. It seemed wrong that all of those people — maybe a half million, she sometimes thought — should be blinked out of existence without anyone knowing. But it was like fighting the tide. No matter what she told Mara, the woman always lost it.