by Hickey, Greg
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 disbelie
f, 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 t
he 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.