by Platt, Sean
“I don’t see how tabloid theories could possibly make you think—”
“The Astrals came prepared, guys,” Kamal said, looking around the fire. “Think about it. It’s been thousands of years, and they somehow had their viceroys pre-selected. It looked like an elimination tournament when it happened, but Mara’s files told a different story. They knew who they’d select in advance. How could that happen if they didn’t have someone on the inside, reporting back?”
“The Mullah portal, maybe,” said Sadeem. “Or the way they saw through Meyer and others on ayahuasca.”
Kamal shook his head. “That’s what I thought at first, too. But doesn’t your portal require direct interaction — meaning someone has to walk right up and talk to the ‘Horsemen’ and eventually decide it’s time to invite them back?”
Across the fire, Peers shifted uncomfortably.
Sadeem nodded. “But with the drugs—”
“Ayahuasca ‘journeying’ or portal, the Initiate had background on it all. But based on what the Initiate felt it knew, both of those things only provided a sensory experience of being here. The Astrals could look through our eyes for a time, and feel through our limbs in the moment. But they didn’t possess or download us. It’d be like peeping through a hole. Yet they arrived far more prepared than peepholes should allow. Their Divinities knew our language—”
“Maybe they watched our TV,” Clara interrupted Kamal.
“And they knew how to mimic our bodies exactly. What our gravity would feel like.”
“They’ve been here before.”
“And gravity doesn’t change. But locomotion evolves like anything, and immunities certainly change. Pathogens change. Radiation changes; think of all the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth shit we just started beaming through the air in decades before they came. Basic human body language, the way we think, the way they knew they could mimic our governments and subtle social structures in ways that would mostly keep us under control at first, then serve to manipulate us later. Their complex understanding of the vast ant farm this planet represents. I’m telling you, they knew more than a portal or drug trips could tell them. They had to because they’re scientists. You don’t just set an experiment and walk away for thousands of years.”
“They left the Ark behind to record our behavior,” Clara said. “Cameron told us the Ark’s job was to record what happened while they were away. It made a record of all our deeds and misdeeds so they could judge us.”
“Yes,” Kamal said. “But think of what it’s like to be a person. That’s on-the-ground knowledge that can’t be conveyed by entries in an archive. And even so — even with all their prep — we surprised them. I mean, consider the Internet. They expected us to form a mental collective like theirs, but we formed one outside our heads with fiber-optic lines. They understood the concept of our old network but not its execution. They got the gist but not the details. If they’d only had the portal, they wouldn’t even have that. They needed a partial solution to bridge the gap.”
“Which was?”
“The argument made over and over in the Initiate files — in far more boring detail than I’m giving you — was that they decided to use a ‘nomadic observer’ that ‘lived autonomously.’”
“What’s that?” Clara asked.
“Something here to observe us. Nomadic: free to move from host to host rather than being bound by time and location. And ‘autonomously’ meant that this … whatever it was … wasn’t like a spy. It was just here. Living. Being. But not functioning like an agent for the other side.”
Sadeem caught Kamal’s eye. Clara and Peers turned toward the old man, curious.
“This is making sense to you, isn’t it?” Kamal asked Sadeem.
“Perhaps. But only in rumors. I wasn’t an Elder of the old order, so I can only guess. But the Elders sometimes spoke of ghosts. Of Horsemen spirits who’d watch us.”
With the Mullah’s tiny corroboration, Kamal felt encouraged to continue. Maybe he wasn’t so crazy to believe this after all, no matter the doubt in Clara’s eyes.
“There was a list. It was, so far as I can tell, only guesswork. The Initiate figured that whatever the Astrals left among us, it would have to be nearly (if not literally) immortal. There were no remotely verifiable legends of ancient men or women living thousands of years, so the theory was that the observers weren’t confined to a single body. Hence nomadic. It’s painted as a kind of energy that would latch onto a human and live with it. That human would live a normal life then die, at which point the energy — the observer — would move to a new host.”
“Like being possessed?” Clara said.
“More like symbiosis: two organisms living together for mutual benefit. The energy of an additional ‘soul’ for want of a better word would make the host stronger, healthier, and much higher-functioning on a mental level. Sometimes that higher function would create geniuses.”
“Like Elvis,” said Peers, chuckling.
“Like Socrates, maybe,” said Kamal, not returning the laugh. “Like Leonardo da Vinci, whom the Initiate named itself after.”
“Da Vinci was an alien?” said Peers.
“A hybrid. But it was only a theory, based on all sorts of criteria the Initiate drew up.”
“Who else?”
“They proposed that there were probably several hybrids here at any time, though they had no idea how many. I don’t remember their list of possibilities. But they were all names I knew — every one of them. Maybe that’s because the Initiate had no way to look up unremarkable people to identify them, or maybe it’s because the symbiont made them stand out. Gandhi was another. A few — but curiously not all — of the Dalai Lamas. Einstein, maybe? Most if not all of the biggest religious figures proposed to have actually walked the planet.”
“That’s convenient,” said Clara.
“They were just guesses. And sometimes, it didn’t work out. Initiate papers proposed that there was a clash between the host and the observer’s energies. But when that happened, the observer couldn’t just leave; it was ‘tethered’ for the duration of the host’s life. Again, only guesses — but this is where Mara’s group proposed we got the Hitlers. The Charles Mansons.”
“Also convenient,” said Clara.
Kamal had his hands out, speaking with his whole body. When he saw Clara cross her arms, he lowered his. He reminded himself that she’d just lost her mother. That she’d never had a normal life, or even a chance. And that Kamal, who’d thought he was doing his job to deliver the news Stranger had once wanted delivered, was insinuating things she’d rather not hear about the only family she had left.
Before Kamal could decide whether to continue or stop, Sadeem reached over and put a quiet hand on her shoulder. Clara had barely known her father, and her grandfather had always been distant. The old Mullah had been the next best thing for most of her life.
“It fits, Clara. We’ve seen it ourselves. Logan couldn’t do what you did, holding back the Forgetting. Nobody else could do more than protect their own memories. But you managed to remain as a splinter under their skin. You kept the door between them and us propped open. I’ve often wondered why the Astrals only replaced Meyer with a Titan but not any of the other viceroys … and I’ve wondered why, twice now, the Titans they made to replace him turned to humanity’s side.”
“He’s not possessed,” said Clara. “He’s not one of them.”
“He is who he is. You need to understand that. Everything I’ve read says that the human plus the Astral energy makes its own thing — a new person, not a person being controlled by something outside himself. The Meyer you’ve always known has had this ‘thing’ from the start — probably since birth. It’s not a coercive force. It’s cooperative. It’s part of him and always has been, no different from a beauty mark on his face.”
“But he’d be Astral. He’d be against us.”
“He’s never been against us, Clara,” said Peers. “Nor was the first duplicate, nor
Kindred, nor Stranger. There have been four versions of this being now, and each has had its own will and made its own decisions — in every case, turning against the occupation. The man Meyer was born as lives with the symbiont as part of himself, but it’s like there are two voices in his head, and those voices are like two people who have to argue things out and come to consensus. These people? They don’t know what they are. Knowing Meyer, the observer has probably been beaten into submission most of their shared life. Lying dormant inside, waiting to be woken to its true potential.”
Clara was quiet. Looking down. Cutting lines in the sand with her toe.
And Kamal thought: Why did Stranger send me to deliver this message? Why here, why now — why at all?
It changed nothing. If she had somehow managed to inherit a change the observer had made to Meyer’s genetic code, then Clara had it whether or not she knew its source. If her grandfather had been carrying an Astral hitchhiker all his life, nothing was different now that Clara knew the truth — other than her new sadness, loss, and feeling of foolish betrayal.
But then Clara looked up and asked something unexpected.
“Why did they copy him at all, if he was half-Astral? Why didn’t they just let him be viceroy as himself? If he’s one of these hybrid things, wouldn’t he make more sense as a leader than someone fully human — and more sense than some Titan duplicate?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think I do.” Clara bored into Kamal with her strong brown eyes, so much like shadows in the night. She didn’t seem sad, as he’d thought. She looked sternly manic — or perhaps finally driven mad from the pressure.
“We should get to sleep so we can make for the freighter at first light,” she said, suddenly standing.
“Clara, I …”
Clara met Kamal’s eyes, then all of their eyes.
“I know what we need to do,” she said, an almost-sinister smile dawning. “But we need to hurry. Because they’re starting to know, too.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
I know what we need to do.
A young woman’s voice.
Liza sat up. She was in the canyon alcove, the big rock pushed aside to vent some moonlight. She didn’t like it in here, but it felt like a case of lesser evils. There might be snakes in the darkest places, but there were likely to be wolves or coyotes or something worse prowling the open. Liza didn’t know. She’d spent her life avoiding wilderness whenever possible. She’d grown up in a city, trekked across European cities as a twentysomething, gone to uni in a city, and settled into Cape Town (a city) as governmental aide, and eventually risen through the ranks to rule it as a new city. The New World didn’t have cities, and for some reason she hadn’t forgotten her past hatred of wild things like the others, which would have made the lack of cities easier to take. But she’d settled into the next best thing, cloistering inside a rectory with scads of men at her command to ward off bears, should they arrive.
It had been hard to sleep, even as protected from possible coyotes (but not snakes) as she was. The New World was annoyingly biodiverse. You’d think with all the flooding and death, at least there’d be no more scorpions or rattlesnakes. But whether the Astrals had intervened or there’d been a lot of critters clinging to driftwood the world over, an obnoxious number of toothed and fanged and many-legged things had survived. Her skin crawled.
And now there was this bitch whispering in Liza’s ear, waking her up further.
“What?” Liza asked the darkness, surer than ever that she’d gone insane and was now living out life in an unpleasant haze. “What the fuck do we need to do?”
But the bitch didn’t answer.
Liza tried to find the tiny spot she’d found earlier, where she could pretend to be less than hideously uncomfortable. The alcove floor behind the big rock was hard and inhospitable. There was sand everywhere, full of snot or spider webs or something Liza wanted nothing to do with. Echoes in this place made what was probably just farting mice sound like the stirring of scaly things. And it was cold. How could a place so uncomfortably hot by day be so freezing cold by night? It wasn’t fair.
And she was still pretty dehydrated, despite finding some plastic water bottles in the stash that Stranger or his minions had stolen from the idiots in the village: smartphones, tablet computers, books and Vellums containing stories of strangely real places that no longer existed, iPods, even condoms. Couldn’t leave condoms floating around. Not only were they clearly not made of sheep intestines (if there were even still sheep); they’d also prevent much-needed pregnancies. The New World was a man’s dream. They had to fuck everything they could. It was the only way to get the human race up and running again.
And on top of it all, Liza’s sunburn was somehow both radiant hot and freezing cold. That bullshit wasn’t fair, either. She’d blister and peel and probably get medieval skin cancer thanks to all this sunbathing, but the hot coals that were her shoulders couldn’t even keep her from shivering. The burn robbed heat from her core to blast it uselessly into the night air, giving Liza the worst of both worlds.
I know what we need to do.
Now more of an echo than a real and present thing. (As real and present as voices in one’s head could be, anyway.)
This time, Liza decided not to answer. She wouldn’t give the voice the satisfaction. You wanted to talk to Liza, you walked up and faced her. You didn’t whisper from the void. People who whispered from voids instead of having the guts to look Liza in the eye were punks.
Besides, Liza knew what she needed to do, too.
She’d found the backpack. Easily. It had been right there on the top of what looked like a miniature dragon’s horde when she’d pulled away the concealing blanket in the little cave-like space in the canyon, highlighted by a sunbeam coming around the rock door as the day’s light faded. She’d practically heard an angelic choir raise their voices upon the revelation. So she’d grabbed it, feeling like Indiana Jones discovering an idol, and she’d rummaged through the thing to see what the first voice in her head (not this new one; the new one was a bitch) thought was so important. She’d found pretty much the entirety of her old desk drawer, right down to a few stacks of yellow Post-Its. Liza had already used the Post-Its to decorate her space for the night. It only seemed right. And she’d also found other useless miscellany packed in a rush before she’d boarded the vessel to leave the flooding city: pens, an address book full of dead people’s contact information, a tiny instruction booklet for a Fitbit — the device itself also present, long ago drained but still good for kicks. She’d found two beat-up Lärabars in one of the side pockets that she was sure she hadn’t packed in Ember Flats, meaning they weren’t just twenty years old but closer to forty, and she’d eaten them anyway, curious now if forty-year-old nuts and honey could give her a disease. She knew honey didn’t spoil. Nuts, though, might. Maybe she had parasites. There was no way to be sure.
By the time she’d found the backpack, it had been too near dark to set out amid all the wolves and snakes and probably marauding rape gangs. So Liza had hugged the thing to her as she wiggled into place on the mostly rock floor, using it as a clutch pillow. She knew only that the backpack mattered, not why. Someone wanted it. Someone wanted her mechanical pencils and the digital audio recorder she sometimes used to capture thoughts rather than jotting them down and her blue and pink highlighters and the gum that had fossilized over the years. It mattered. And Liza knew what she needed to do when morning came.
She needed to exit this little cave with the pack on her back.
And she needed to walk out of here.
The rest was just details.
“Let me sleep,” she said.
Noises outside the door. Probably wolves, massing against her. After her remaining Lärabar — this one stiffer than the rest. A possible weapon. The young woman’s voice ran again through Liza’s head, a bit more familiar each time. Had she heard it around the village? It was possible. But whom did it belong to?
Well, Liza was smarter than that.
And that’s when she started wonder if the reason the voice seemed so familiar was because it wasn’t actually taunting her. It wasn’t insulting her by talking all about knowing what to do as if Liza didn’t have plans of her own. Maybe it was there to help her.
She tried to remember the dream.
Something about that same voice talking to other voices. It was sort of fuzzy. Liza had the distinct impression the dream was like a broadcast thing rather than a native vision. It felt — in that distant way past dreams always felt — as if someone might have been explaining the dream to her rather than her having it on her own. Like it was someone else’s dream, or vision, or whatever, and that Liza was maybe snooping.
She could see the faint shadows of the wolves outside, playing through her chamber’s opening against the far wall. They were especially tricky wolves because they didn’t seem to be walking on four legs. Judging by the silhouettes, they seemed to be walking upright, like humans.
Liza wondered again if she was being paranoid.
She thought of her two missing time gaps — between the rectory garden and the freighter, then between the freighter and the open desert — and wondered again if maybe she wasn’t thinking clearly, or coming apart at the seams. Good thing the fact that you wondered if you were crazy meant you couldn’t actually be crazy. That made the upright-walking wolves in their Chevy outside stalking her so much easier to accept.
She slunk back.
She should hide the backpack. They wanted it. They wanted what was inside it. And she’d promised it (in a way) to the young woman who seemed to know what to do. Or possibly to someone else entirely.