Our Dried Voices

by Hickey, Greg

  “Around that time, those of us who remained decided to put a new plan into motion, the plan that has brought you here today, as well as several others before you, whom you may recall knowing. In the days before they came to Pearl, the greatest challenges spurred human beings to the loftiest intellectual heights. We decided to employ a similar principle in our effort to recruit the last of the intelligent humans. And so we removed the conveniences of your former colony people had so long taken for granted, conveniences that allowed them the treacherous luxury of avoiding thought. Each set of challenges was designed to identify one or more individuals in the colony capable of exercising his own mind. The challenges then progressed in difficulty and complexity until we felt confident that a particular individual had acquired sufficient knowledge and critical thought that he or she might be brought here to join us. That is the meaning of the incidents in the colony. That is the meaning of the little drawings you discovered. We designed all of it for the sole purpose of bringing you here and preserving the human race as an intelligent, thinking species. For we are the last vestiges of anything that might be considered humanity. But come. See for yourself.”

  And with these words, Leomedes swept his arm back in the direction of the far wall, beyond the gallery of people arranged behind him, toward of one of the many tunnels that led out of the chamber and into the mountain. Samuel had never heard a person talk so long or so well. At times, he felt as though the words had just passed through him, that he had not really heard them or grasped their meaning. But he understood what Leomedes had said about the challenges. His arms and the top of his head tingled with a rush of emotion. Still, he was curious to know more. Leomedes moved toward the tunnel, and Samuel fell in beside him. The other people gathered in the chamber made to follow in their stead, but Leomedes called out “Fia,” and the woman that Samuel had known only as the First Hero came up to walk beside them.

  They entered the tunnel, Samuel and Leomedes together in front, Fia just behind them and the others trailing behind her. The passage was wide enough for two people to pass comfortably side-by-side, and the floor was smooth and polished. Electric lights hung from the walls every twenty or so meters and provided just enough illumination for them to move safely through the tunnel.

  “We found them almost as they are,” said Leomedes, inclining his head to indicate their surroundings. “Built by the first people who came to this place. We made them wider, smoothed out the floors, but these lights, that first room you entered, they were here long before my time.”

  Samuel gazed around him, his mind too overwhelmed with unformed questions to pose a single one at that moment. They walked through the half-lit passage for several minutes. Numerous other tunnels intersected with their own, the darkened paths running off in all directions, and Samuel quailed at the thought of the enormity of this system of passageways that may have very well spanned the entire mountain.

  But then the tunnel opened into daylight, and at first Samuel thought they had returned to his colony. They emerged from the mountain about ten meters above a lush valley dotted with trees, small plants and a pond. There were buildings too, albeit not the great halls of the colony, but modest, wooden buildings of various sizes. A herd of the strange brown creatures roamed within a pasture enclosed by a fence very much like the one bordering Samuel’s colony, although no such barrier surrounded the rest of this meadow. And as Samuel studied the scene before him, he realized that they must have emerged on the other side of the mountains, and that he was now overlooking a new meadow, a new colony.

  “Welcome,” said Leomedes. “Welcome to our home.”

  He and Fia waited as Samuel drank in the sight before them. The others moved around them and descended to the meadow by a set of stairs carved into the mountainside to their right.

  “This is the second colony of Pearl,” Leomedes continued. “This is the place our ancestors built when they could no longer stomach life in your colony.”

  “But how…” Samuel began.

  “The same way everything is built,” said Leomedes. “The same way humans built everything they did throughout their existence: with their minds and their bodies and time.”

  Together they stared out at the little colony strewn at their feet before Leomedes spoke again. “You are welcome to stay here tonight. Fia will take care of you. She will answer any questions you might have. I will be around if you need me, but I have some other business to attend to at the moment.”

  He turned and walked toward the stairs.

  “Thank you,” Samuel said, once Leomedes had set foot on the first step.

  Leomedes looked back at Samuel over his shoulder.

  “You are most welcome, Samuel,” he said, speaking Samuel’s name for the first time. “We are happy to have you here. There is an old story of a young man named Samuel who was called to do great things. I think the name suits you well.”

  “Yes,” Samuel managed, his tongue thick in his mouth. “Yes, thank you.”

  Leomedes bowed his head and pressed his thin lips together. Then he turned back to the steps and disappeared from sight. Fia put a hand on the small of Samuel’s back.

  “Come,” she said, and Samuel followed her to the stairs, and together they descended into the meadow.

  * * *

  For the rest of the day, Fia guided Samuel around the colony. They began at the fenced-in pasture, where a great herd of the large brown creatures shuffled about, grazing idly on the grass or gulping water from wooden troughs affixed to the insides of the fence. These animals, which Fia called “cows,” were tended by several colonists who ensured the creatures were sufficiently nourished and treated any injuries or illnesses they might suffer. These handlers also directed the killing and butchering of the animals, a process Samuel asked Fia to let him witness. They watched as one of the handlers led a cow from its pen and into the long, low building nearby. A central aisle ran the length of the building, bounded on either side by several wooden stalls. The handler led the cow into one of these stalls and tied its neck loosely to a hook on the rear wall of the compartment. He then took the animal’s head in his hands and looked deep into its eyes. He whispered something to the cow, then pressed its forehead against his own.

  “Pastor is thanking the cow for its sacrifice,” Fia whispered to Samuel.

  Pastor drew a sharp, metal tool from his belt. He stepped to the animal’s side and stroked the back of its neck. Then in one quick motion, he held the cow’s head in one hand and drew the tool across its throat with the other. A bright red liquid spurted against the white fur on its chest as its knees buckled and it slumped to the ground and lay there motionless.

  Samuel shuddered at the memory of the cow in the enclosed room behind the meal hall. “Is it…?” he whispered to Fia.

  “Yes,” she replied. “We do our best to make it painless.”

  Samuel looked at the cow’s wide eyes and open mouth and thought of the face of the male who died from drinking the poisoned river water. Pastor stooped down and gently wiped the creature’s eyelids closed.

  “Does Pastor make the meal cakes too?” Samuel asked.

  Fia laughed. She took his arm and began to lead him from the building.

  “We do not have meal cakes here,” she said. “Pastor will prepare the cow for us to eat. He will make sure that all parts of it are used for some purpose. They are very valuable animals. Like humans, the females also produce a liquid that is good to drink. What we do not eat we can use for building and making clothes and blankets.”

  Back outside, Fia led Samuel to another part of the colony where other colonists tended to a variety of plants, even more than Samuel had seen in the secret rooms in his own colony. There were rows and rows of many bright green leafy plants of all sizes and shades and varieties, bunches of wispy golden stalks, and even some trees adorned with vibrantly colored spheres of red and green and orange.

  “This is where the rest of our food is grown,” said Fia. “They are like those
plants you discovered in the greenhouses.”

  Samuel stared at the verdant fields in amazement. “There are so many.”

  “Yes,” said Fia, “and they are all good to eat, and they all taste different.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They do different things to your mouth. They are not like meal cakes. I will show you later.”

  She led him on to see all the many sights and activities of their colony. There were whole buildings dedicated to different endeavors. Some were small structures occupied by one or two people, while others were nearly as long as the halls in Samuel’s colony but only about three meters high. In one of the smaller buildings, a woman dressed in a brightly colored shirt of pale green and blue swirls sat before a wooden rack lined with many colored strings and wove them together to make large pieces of fabric. Fia introduced her as Huri and explained that she and her helpers made the clothing for every person in their colony. None of these colonists dressed in the plain off-white smocks of Samuel’s colony. Fia herself wore a bright red open-necked shirt and loose white pants.

  In the next building, Olla and his assistant Hesta molded hard red soil into flat circles and deep half-spheres and heated them in a large metal container to make the dishes used for serving food throughout the colony. In other small huts, different people shaped pieces of metal into tools and dried out cow skin and fashioned it into a variety of containers and clothing. Still others painted pictures in a multitude of vivid colors or carved figures out of stone, merely to create objects that were pleasing to the eye.

  Next they visited one of the larger halls, which was lined with wooden tables that stretched the length of the building. Dozens of people sat bent over these tables and furiously scribbled numbers, words and diagrams, pored over piles of paper, and tinkered with all kinds of metals, glasses, wires, plants and fabrics.

  “This is where I work,” said Fia. “The people in this building are trying to understand more about our world.”

  She led Samuel to a space at one of the tables where a single darkened light bulb rested next to a collection of glass and metal and wires. “I am working with lights,” she said as she gestured to the objects on the table. “We have them in the mountains and in your greenhouses. We have discovered how they work, but now we are trying to build our own.”

  Samuel gazed around at the many gadgets beyond his comprehension.

  “Everything you have seen so far, in your colony and in ours, someone here is trying to improve,” said Fia. “Humans built your colony long ago, and now we want to discover how these things work so we may use them for ourselves and make them better.”

  She led Samuel into another long hall with floor-to-ceiling shelves on both sides, all of them stacked high with sheets of paper bound in dried cow skins.

  “This is the library,” said Fia, as she removed one of the heaps of paper from its shelf, “and these are books. They contain information and stories about the world so we can learn from them. Some of these were brought here from Earth by the first people to come to Pearl. That is how we know of our ancestors.”

  The next building, on the opposite side of the library from the workshop, was about half the length of the previous two halls. Fia opened the door, and together they peered inside. A large circular table dominated the room, with many rows of empty wooden benches beyond it. The middle of the table had also been cut out in a circle, and there were people seated all around the inside and outside of the table. They spoke incessantly and seemed to be arguing about something, but their words came so quickly, and many were beyond Samuel’s understanding.

  “These people help make the rules for our colony,” whispered Fia. “They discuss what they think is best for us to do until they agree on a new rule or a change to an old one. Then the rest of us gather and choose whether or not we will accept their idea. Right now they are trying to decide how the food and other products should be distributed.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Samuel.

  Fia closed the door. “Every person in our colony must work in some way. We each get to choose the activity we most enjoy. And because we each make something different, we share our products with one another. So Pastor and the other herders share the food they get from the cows, just as Huri shares the clothing she makes. But some people think this sharing should be done differently. And that is what they are trying to decide.”

  Samuel nodded.

  “The most important thing is that each person does something with his mind. That is the first rule of our colony: ‘Each human must use his mind actively and productively in the way it is meant to be used.’ That is the standard of our race, that we can think, that we can use our minds to solve problems and make the world better for ourselves. So everyone who lives in this colony must do just that.”

  “Yes, our colony does not have that,” said Samuel. A troubling thought occurred to him. “But what about a rule against hurting another person?”

  Fia’s brow wrinkled. “Of course,” she said, “that goes without saying.”

  “But…”

  “What?” asked Fia.

  “I don’t know. Never mind.”

  Fia waited a moment but Samuel remained silent. They walked on, exploring everything else there was to see in the colony until the sun hovered over the horizon and the sky blazed bright orange.

  * * *

  As the sun set, they came to the building where Fia lived, a small wooden house with walls made of long cylindrical poles stacked lengthwise one on top of the other. The interior had no floor, only hard, compact dirt, so smooth and even it did not stain the bottoms of their feet. The ceiling was constructed from more wooden poles laid parallel to one another atop the walls, with the gaps between the wood sealed with packed brown earth. Each wall had a large square window filled with a glass pane. Two beds and a simple wooden table and chairs furnished the room.

  Fia set about making the evening meal. She handed Samuel a metal pail and asked him to fetch some water from the pond. By the time he returned, Fia had laid out the food to be prepared on the table. There was a thick slab of some fleshy crimson substance Fia said had come from one of the cows, a mixture of leaves of different sizes and shades of green, and two square-shaped pieces of a soft, roughly textured food called “bread,” which Fia told him she had made from the tan-colored plants in the meadow. She cooked the cow meat over a wispy orange light that flickered and danced inside a metal shell.

  When they sat down to eat, Fia picked up the two metal rods that lay on the table next to her plate. A matching set rested at Samuel’s place, one of them pressed into a sharp edge along one half of the tool, the other with what almost looked like a hand at one end. Samuel picked up the tools and stared at them curiously.

  “I doubt you have used a fork and knife before,” Fia said, her eyes sparkling with that familiar copper gleam.

  Samuel shook his head. Fia held the tools aloft and indicated for Samuel to follow suit. She used the four prongs of the fork to stab her portion of meat and hold it in place, then cut off a bite-sized piece with her knife and raised it to her mouth on the spears of the fork. Samuel watched her and tried to imitate as best he could, knowing he must have looked as uncomfortable as he felt.

  “Something else that sets us apart from the animals,” said Fia. Samuel looked up from his struggles with the cow meat and saw her smiling at him kindly.

  He forced a grin as he turned the meat over in his mouth. “I guess so.”

  They ate in silence for a while. Samuel kept his head down, but peered up occasionally from under his brow to watch Fia handle her utensils. She finished her meal before Samuel was even halfway done. When his hands hurt from gripping the fork and knife so tightly, he set them down and looked at Fia. She watched him without a shred of impatience or amusement at his struggles.

  “Do you remember me?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she answered. “You were one of those who followed me. You and that woman.”

&
nbsp; “Penny,” said Samuel.

  “Yes. Penny.”

  Samuel looked back down at his food. He picked up his utensils and managed to cut off another piece of meat. He chewed it slowly and swallowed. “What happens now?”

  Fia’s face clouded briefly. “You are allowed to stay one night as our guest. But tomorrow you must choose.”

  “Choose?” Samuel asked. “Choose what?”

  “Whether or not you will live here with us from now on.”

  XXV

  Samuel awoke the next morning to find Leomedes seated at the table in the middle of the room. Fia was preparing the morning meal.

  “Good morning, Samuel,” said Leomedes. “I trust Fia has taken good care of you.”

  “Yes, she has,” Samuel replied. “Good morning.”

  Fia served the food into three bowls and set them on the table. “Come and eat,” she said to Samuel.

  The meal consisted of a mixture of some rough, beige flakes with a subtle flavor similar to bread, and some sweet-tasting slices of the brightly colored spheres that grew on the trees in the meadow. Samuel could not imagine eating meal cakes again. When they had finished, Fia cleared the dishes away from the table. Leomedes stood up.

  “Thank you Fia,” he said. “Everything was wonderful.” He turned to Samuel. “Come with me. There is something I want to show you. Goodbye, Fia. We will see you later.”

  “Goodbye, Fia,” said Samuel. “Thank you for everything.”

  Fia poured some water on the dishes and began to clean them in the metal basin next to the fireplace. She looked up and held Samuel’s gaze for a moment. Faint creases had appeared under her eyes and in the hollows of her cheeks. “You’re very welcome, Samuel,” she said. “I will see you later.”