Hollow World

by Michael J. Sullivan

  “I don’t know. Pax has never told me. I learned about it through mutual friends. Pax was in an emergency room under observation. No one knew what to do. What Pax needed was Pax—someone who could look inside and understand the demons. But there is only one Pax. Still, I couldn’t let…I volunteered to move in, to watch and protect Pax. I’d do anything, you understand—anything, only I’m not Pax. I can’t do the magic, and I watched the depression creep in. And then you came.” Vin looked up, that same frown returning. “I knew you were trouble. I could see hope in Pax and knew that was like raising an egg over hard ground. The fall would come, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men wouldn’t help. Pax is a treasure of untold worth…and you destroyed that.”

  “Are you saying Pax is dead?” Ellis felt sick, his brand-new heart on the verge of breaking. Not again. I can’t have done it again.

  “Probably.”

  “Probably? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Pax was in quite a state after seeing you last, and pistols don’t have safety features. They don’t have auto-locks that prevent damage to living tissue when placed against a person’s head, do they? And there aren’t any voxes on the surface to call for help. Thanks to you, the only means of locating Pax is floating somewhere near Neptune.” Vin’s lips quivered. “I haven’t seen or heard from Pax in over five weeks.”

  “Listen, I just came here to see if Pax was back, to see if Pax was okay. I wanted to talk—wanted to say I was sorry. I would have come sooner, but I died. I just woke up a week ago. Pol said Pax wasn’t here and had me doing—” Ellis let his shoulders slump as a crushing weight settled. “It doesn’t matter. Have people searched for Pax?”

  “Of course.” Vin was visibly crying. Tears slipped down from under the mask, leaving tracks that glistened in the light. No sound, though, just a quivering lip. “I mobilized every close friend Pax has—and that’s a big army. If Pax ever wanted to seize control of the planet, it wouldn’t be hard. But no—we’ve been looking for weeks and still nothing. I’m all but convinced Pax is lying in some out-of-the-way place on the surface with that gun of yours in a cold hand.”

  “There’s no way at all to find Pax?”

  “It’s a big planet. I just hope wherever Pax is, it’s raining. Pax loved the rain, you know?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE TIME IS NOW

  Ellis had every intention of setting off on a quest to find Pax, but it took all of five minutes to realize that wasn’t practical. He had no idea where to begin looking. If Vin and Pol couldn’t find Pax after more than a month, what chance did he have? Ellis didn’t even own a Port-a-Call.

  Leaves were just starting to turn yellow and the air was cooler than when Ellis had left, but little else at the farm had changed. All the shifting through time was disorienting, as if he were skimming through the book of his life. Ellis returned to the farm less out of desire and more out of a lack of anywhere else to go. Vin had been more than willing to open a portal to Greenfield Village, wanting Ellis to be gone just as much as Ellis wanted to leave. While Warren and the others would take him in, and had saved his life, Ellis wasn’t sold on the New America idea. He wasn’t convinced that Hollow World was so awful. He’d seen the beauty for himself, and his conversation with Sol had only deepened his appreciation. A world without constraints, fear, or pain—wasn’t that how most imagined heaven? And yet it did feel empty. Not because of its lack of challenge or individuality—he would still have plenty of that—but something else entirely. Both Warren’s New America and Hollow World remained bleak and meaningless to him for one simple and unexpected reason—they both lacked Pax.

  Alva has a hot-chocolate pattern for you to try.

  He remembered looking at the portal, seeing the dining room.

  I could have gone. I could have walked through. How hard would that have been? Why didn’t I? I would have if I had known what it meant to Pax.

  He remembered Pax’s face and the single desperate word…Please.

  One more bad decision; one more death on his conscience.

  Ellis paused at the end of Firestone Lane and stared down its length at the old farmhouse. For good or ill, this would be his home. Where else could he go?

  The only one in the farmhouse was Yal, who, as always, was cooking.

  Ellis didn’t have a watch—no way to tell the time except by the sun. Late afternoon, he guessed. Maybe five o’clock. Being autumn now, the days would be shorter, so maybe four o’clock? What was it, September? October? The stalks of corn in the field were brown. When did that happen in Michigan? Had the climate changed? He was annoyed with how his points of reference continually shifted. Just as he was settling in, he had skipped ahead again.

  “Master Ellis Rogers.” Yal nodded, almost bowed, when Ellis entered to the scent of something baking—smelled like bread.

  Pots boiled and chopped carrots and onions cascaded on the cutting board like splayed decks of cards. Yal was wearing an apron stained with handprints and held a towel in one hand, a butcher’s knife in the other.

  “Master?” Ellis didn’t like the sound of the word, especially on an old-fashioned farm.

  Yal nodded again. “Master Ren has decreed that the two of you should have a formal address as per your status in the community.”

  “Our status? What’s our status?”

  “As leaders, mentors, superiors.” Yal scooped up the carrots with the blade of the knife and slopped them into one of the bubbling pots.

  “Masters? What’s wrong with elder, teacher, sir, or even sensei?”

  “I think Master Ren felt master was more appropriate.”

  “Yal!” Rob stomped along the porch, entering the kitchen covered in dirt and sweat, a wooden switch in hand. Rob raised the stick threateningly. “You lazy turd! Get your ass—” The former Ved Two halted, spotting Ellis. “Oh—” Rob quickly lowered the switch. “I didn’t know you were back, master.”

  The honorific combined with the stick in Rob’s hand set off alarm bells.

  “I was just coming by to whip some sense into Yal. Need to do that on occasion.”

  What kind of place is Warren making?

  “Why?” Ellis asked. “You can see Yal is working.” He pointed at the peeled potatoes, the chopped onions and carrots.

  “That doesn’t matter.” Rob began to clap the stick into his palm. “It’s the pecking order. Ved One—ah, Bob—beats me, so I get to beat Yal.”

  “And I’ll get to beat Mib, right?” Yal asked.

  “Of course.”

  Ellis couldn’t take his eyes off the stick as it slapped in Rob’s three-fingered hand. About as thick as his thumb, there was still bark on it, green and white patches where the branches had been trimmed off. There’s a pecking order to the world, Ricky the Dick had reminded him, and God put you at the bottom.

  “But Yal isn’t doing anything wrong,” Ellis protested. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” Rob said. “This is survival of the fittest. We don’t want weak people here. Members of the Firestone Family need to be hard as rocks to stand the brutal days ahead. Yal is still the new recruit. Master Ren wants to toughen the young one up. Indoctrinate Yal to the way things are done here.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Ellis asked.

  “Ah—no, master.” Rob looked puzzled. “That’s right from Master Ren’s own mouth. He wants us all to be tough as he is. Fact is, I’m trying to help Yal here. Master Ren has decided that we’ll be divided into hes, shes, and its based on how we behave. Now that we’ll be living among real humans—once the women arrive—he wants to get us ready. Yal is on the list right now as a she.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  Again that puzzled look. “Master Ren says women are inferior to men. Yal won’t want to be a woman, but will be unless I can shape his ass up.”

  “Shape his ass up?”

  “Yeah, Master Ren thinks Yal might be a little too
light in the loafers.”

  “Yal doesn’t even wear shoes.”

  “It’s a figure of speech. It means—”

  “I know what it means. It’s something Warren taught you, but apparently he skipped the lesson on sarcasm.”

  Rob continued to stare at him, bewildered.

  Ellis was angry. He was mad at Rob for blindly following orders, mad at Yal for gleefully accepting a beating with the promise that the cook could do the same to the next recruit. He was angry with Warren for creating such a vicious system. Mostly he was mad at himself. For that he had plenty of reasons.

  “Where is old Master Ren, anyway?”

  “In the village—Menlo Park, inside Edison’s workshop.”

  “I think maybe I ought to have a talk with him.”

  Ellis aimed for the door, but stopped short, reached out, and pulled the switch away from Rob. “Don’t go hitting anyone anymore.”

  “But Master Ren—”

  “Yeah, I know. Master Ren likes hitting a little too much, and if I’m going to live here, that’s going to have to change.”

  Ellis marched the length of Firestone Lane. Thinking back, he realized he’d made a lot of excuses for Warren over the years. Warren had lost control many times, and he had pulled his friend out of more than a few bar fights, usually because of something stupid that Warren had said. Then there was the time Ellis visited the Eckard household. Warren’s second wife, Kelly, had answered the door wearing her husband’s big mirrored aviators. The sunglasses, long-sleeved shirt, and makeup couldn’t hide the split lip.

  “Fell down the stairs,” she had told him with Warren looking on.

  “Maybe you should consider moving to a house that doesn’t have steps,” he had replied, never knowing if she understood his meaning. Kelly wasn’t any better at catching innuendo than Rob. That was the closest he had ever come to defying Warren.

  It only took two thousand years to sink in, but Ellis Rogers could be taught. Maybe it was time Warren learned about the second half of the Bible.

  The Edison laboratory was on the other side of the village, closer to where Ellis had found Geo-24’s body—where he had first met Pax. He had run by it that day, taking no notice of the long peak-roofed building that looked like an old train station with its white clapboard siding, decorative porch posts that gave the impression of archways, and round attic window bisected by muntins to look like crosshairs on a rifle scope. This wasn’t the real Edison lab. By the time Ford thought to relocate the facilities in the 1920s, there was nothing left to move. The buildings had been removed or collapsed. Ford had his workers reconstruct this replica based on photographs and using scavenged materials, but Ellis imagined there wasn’t much difference between the Dearborn version and the New Jersey original.

  Ellis reached the start of the Menlo Park complex, passing the green-tarnished, bronze statue of Edison, sitting grandfatherly on a rock as if about to impart some word of genius. As he walked up Port Street, he saw someone. Although too far away to read a name tag, the Amish outfit suggested that either the person was a member of the Firestone Farm family, or the Mennonites of Pennsylvania had not only survived unobserved but were taking a vacation at the Henry Ford Museum. Whoever it was, they had been leaning on the picket fence surrounding the Menlo Park complex and rushed inside the lab the moment Ellis appeared. By the time Ellis turned onto Christie Street, Warren was on the front porch of the lab waiting for him.

  “Well, well, if it ain’t Mr. Rogers. The prodigal son returns.” Warren stood, his shirt buttoned to the neck, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, with what looked to be grease staining his hands. “How you feeling?”

  “I thought it was Master Rogers?” Ellis said. “Isn’t that what you ordered them to call us?”

  “It is indeed. Figured it was important to establish these things early.”

  “What things? The pecking order?”

  “Yeah.” Warren glanced behind him at the lab, and, putting an arm around Ellis’s shoulders, led him down the steps and out into the yard, where the afternoon sun was casting shadows. In a lower voice he added, “These baldies are nice enough folks, but let’s face it. They really aren’t human—not like you and me, and not like our children will be. Thing is, they aren’t going to die. We’ll be stuck with them forever. I just want to make sure they understand their place in the new world order.”

  Their place? New order? Ellis wasn’t sure if he was in the Old South or Nazi Germany, but wherever it was, the year had to be around 1936. “And what place is that?”

  Warren squinted at him. “What’s with you?”

  “I was just at the farm, where Rob was about to beat Yal with a stick because it was Rob’s turn to be the bully. Told me it was your idea?”

  “Ellis, these underworlders have no concept of authority. I’m working at establishing that. We’ll need discipline once we get going. Folks are going to have to learn to obey orders.”

  “See, that’s the problem right there. Why do they have to learn that? I can see wanting to have women and children and families again, and I can understand the sense of accomplishment in providing real work with real benefits, but that doesn’t mean we have to form a fascist state. Why not be a society of equals?”

  Warren looked at him as if he was having trouble hearing. He used to do that a lot at the bar, mostly when anyone complained about football or suggested his views on women were outdated.

  “Because we aren’t,” Warren said. “That’s socialist talk.”

  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal—second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, remember that?” Ellis said, his voice rising.

  Warren frowned. “Yeah, right—all men. That’s you and me, buddy.”

  “I think Jefferson meant all humans.”

  “Jefferson was a pretty smart guy,” Warren said with a smug smile and a condescending wink. “I think if that’s what he meant, then that’s what he’d have written. Ole Tommy had quite a few slaves running ’round Monticello, you know. Didn’t have any problem differentiating between men and those who served them. Fact is, people aren’t the same. You’re smarter than I am. I’m stronger than you are. These are facts. People want everyone to be the same, but we just aren’t. No one is—well, except the baldies. That’s the problem, and they know it. That’s why they’re here. You and I know how to live in a real society. We understand initiative and thrive on competition. Real men don’t back down from a fight. We know how to take care of ourselves. And when the shit flies, we’ll be the ones who know how to survive. That makes us more valuable, more important. It’s not an insult to them, just a fact of nature. Sure, we’ll all be equal, just some of us will be more equal than others.”

  “That’s what the pigs said.”

  “Huh?” Warren looked at him with squinting eyes.

  “That’s what the pigs said in George Orwell’s Animal Farm.”

  “Never read it.”

  “You’d have liked it. Short, easy to read. About corrupt leaders of revolutions—basically an attack on communism.”

  Warren smirked. “Don’t be stupid. Do I look like Stalin? We’re going to build this new society, you and I, not some greedy politicians, rich fat cats, or intellectual elitists—just us, two regular Joes, and we won’t make the mistakes everyone else did.”

  “I’m pretty sure everyone else said the same thing.”

  “Quit being a prick, will you? Listen. We both remember what it was like when we were kids. Life in the fifties was perfect. Women raised the children. Men provided the money. Children were safe and happy, and the government didn’t interfere. Everyone knew their place, and America roared like a well-tuned GTO. I’m just trying to get us back on track.”

  Ellis wondered if Warren remembered the last conversation they’d had in the bar. It would have been nearly a decade for him, so he doubted it. His friend never had the best memory, even as a kid, but that shouldn’t matter. They had talked abou
t “the good old days” enough that the topic was permanently burned into Warren’s brain. Nostalgia was a popular bar-stool topic, and they had reminisced often.

  “How would you know what life was like then? How could either of us? We were three years old in 1959. You’ve invented a world in your head that never really existed—false memories injected into your brain by television shows that you remember as documentaries. The fifties had their own set of problems.” Ellis was talking to himself just as much as Warren. He was thinking out loud, honestly looking for an intelligent answer.

  Warren rolled his eyes.

  “No—really,” Ellis said. “Think a second. I’ve recently gotten a longer view of the past. We both have. Looking back—I think the brain has a way of erasing the bad stuff. When I remember Peggy, I hardly recall the arguments or the frustrations. I only remember the good times. People are always saying how their high school years were the best in their lives, but I bet if any of them really went back, if they had to deal with parents and teachers and restrictions and peer pressure to do stupid things, they wouldn’t think so. And when we were kids, what did we really know about the world? We both believed in Santa, too, right? Kids are isolated from the real problems, so, of course, it seemed better.”

  “Yeah, yeah, and the fifties sucked for women, blacks, and the gays, right? Big fucking deal. Look around, Ellis. They don’t exist anymore, and they aren’t going to, because you and I will be the fathers of the new human race.”

  “Do you really think women are going to be satisfied with the June Cleaver existence you’ve mapped out for them? Of course, they won’t really be June Cleavers, will they? The Beave’s mom could vote, and smoke, and discovered there was more to life than the scent of Pine-Sol. They divorced their Wards so they could have careers. You don’t want that, so instead you’ve ordered a set of female slaves that won’t ever talk back. But father knows best, right? So that’s okay. Or don’t you care just so long as your version of the past is created?”