by Hickey, Greg
They walked outside. The early morning sun was yellow and bare and starkly beautiful in the vast cloudless sky. Leomedes led Samuel across the meadow toward the mountains. The grass felt rich and springy under his feet.
“Well, Samuel,” said Leomedes, “did you enjoy your stay?”
“Yes, yes I did,” Samuel replied.
“Good. Did Fia answer all your questions?”
“Yes. Everything I asked. But I was also wondering, how do you control the weather?”
“That I do not know,” Leomedes answered. “We know how to use the machine in the control room. You figured that out yourself. It must have been built by the first humans who came to Pearl, the people who created your old colony. But how the machine actually affects the weather remains a secret of those who came before us. Perhaps that is something you could help us discover.”
Two young men ran up beside them. They were both built like Leomedes, thin and wiry-strong, but their bodies were well-hidden beneath loose, off-white tunics—the same clothing worn by members of Samuel’s old colony.
“Excuse me,” said Leomedes, and he ushered the men a few meters away from Samuel where they held a brief whispered conversation. When they had finished, the two men raced away in the direction of the mountains. Leomedes rejoined Samuel.
“We are preparing the challenges to bring the next student to our colony,” he said. “Come, I will show you.”
They walked to the mountain and Samuel followed Leomedes up the stairs and into the dimly lit tunnel. After five minutes, they emerged into the spacious chamber where they had first met, and then Leomedes led Samuel back into the mountain control room. Leomedes moved to the circular console and began to scan the video screens.
“Come here,” he said, beckoning to Samuel.
He pointed at the video in front of him and touched a control on the console below the screen. The image grew larger, centering on a throng of colonists gathered in one of the meal halls. Penny knelt at the center of the crowd, distributing meal cakes at the morning meal.
Samuel hurried forward, eyes fixed to the screen.
“You know her, don’t you?” asked Leomedes. “She is your friend?”
“Penny…” Samuel stared at the tiny image in disbelief. It seemed impossible to imagine Penny passing out meal cakes to a horde of colonists after what he had seen the previous day.
“Penny,” Leomedes repeated.
Samuel shook off his daze and turned to look at him. “Penny. Yes, she is my friend.”
“You have done well with her,” Leomedes said. “She has come a long way. But now she is ready to go one step further.”
“What do you mean?” asked Samuel.
“She is the next one we will bring here,” said Leomedes. “We are preparing the next set of challenges for her.”
Samuel stared at Leomedes for a moment, then back at the video. Penny had finished passing out the meal cakes and was putting the box back on the wall. She turned to leave the hall, her own meal cake in hand, then paused for a moment and looked up, gazing right out of the video screen at Samuel. Samuel leaned forward and steadied himself against the console. He stared back into her eyes, big and glossy as ever. For a moment they seemed to shimmer with some faint spark, though perhaps it was only the video or a trick of the light in the meal hall. But then she looked away and walked toward the door. Samuel turned to follow her on another screen as she exited the meal hall, but Leomedes stopped him.
“Come,” he said. “It is time.”
Leomedes walked to the tunnel. Samuel scanned the videos once more, then followed him back to the large anteroom. The departed heroes of Samuel’s colony waited for him there, Fia among them. Leomedes walked ahead of Samuel to stand with his people. Samuel slowed to a stop in front of them.
“Well, Samuel,” Leomedes began. “You have seen our colony. You have seen the world we are trying to create. Now you must decide whether or not you wish to stay here.”
Samuel stared back at Leomedes, but he did not know what to say. Too many thoughts rushed through his mind. The eyes of those gathered behind Leomedes fell heavily upon him.
“Well?” said Leomedes. “Will you join us?”
He took a step toward Samuel and held out his arm in a welcoming gesture. Yet something about this action struck Samuel the wrong way.
“I… I don’t know,” he replied.
Leomedes stopped in his tracks and sneered incredulously. “You don’t know? What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I…”
“Do you wish you had not learned all you have?”
“No.”
“Do you wish you had not come here at all?”
“No.”
“Do you wish you could go back to living like them?”
“No, of course not.”
“Of course not. There is nothing for you there. You have seen it for yourself. You have felt the heavy, heavy burden of thinking for them, of providing for them. You have been a slave to those who do not possess one shred of the intelligence they would need to truly command you. You are free. Your mind makes you free. There is no reason to imprison yourself among them anymore.”
Fia stepped forward to stand just behind Leomedes.“I know why you hesitate,” she said. “I too have stood where you stand. I too have faced the same decision you now face. But he is right,” she said, glancing toward Leomedes. “If you go back to your old colony, you will forever use your mind only to serve the needs of others. You will have to solve their problems for them. You will have to feed them and protect them the whole of each day, for every day from now until your end. But if you join us, you will be able to use your mind however you want, to solve the problems you wish to solve, to answer the questions you ask yourself in your own mind.”
“All of us here stand upon the brink of a new world,” Leomedes said. “This land, this planet, is still unknown to us. You can help us learn what we wish to know. We want you to help us. And we want to help you learn that which stimulates your mind as well.”
Samuel looked at Fia and then at Leomedes. He glanced down and nodded slowly. But still he did not step forward.
Leomedes went on. “If you join us, you will help us learn and understand and move forward in our knowledge. But if you return to them, you will forever doom them to an eternity without these things, without even thought. For as long as you are a part of that colony, they will never be compelled to learn for themselves. Every challenge they face, you will solve for them. Every question that needs answering and requires the least bit of thought, you will answer for them. And why shouldn’t you? You now possess the intellect to do, in a matter of moments, what it would take their feeble minds days or weeks to accomplish. But as long as you think for them, they will never think for themselves. And then the last vestiges of humanity will be lost.”
“I do not wish to think for those who do not think for themselves,” said Samuel.
“Of course not,” Leomedes replied. “So join us. Together we will help develop their minds. We will help them relearn how to think. We will restore humanity.”
“But what about the people who do not learn?” Samuel asked. “What about the people who do not think for themselves? What will happen to them?”
Leomedes’ face hardened, and his sharp cheekbones pressed against the skin like the mountain rock under layers of snow. “Ah, yes,” he said. “You worry about what our challenges will do to those who are not strong enough to take the path you have followed. But let me ask you something. You encountered the cows in the greenhouses next to the meal halls. You know what happens to them. You know how they are made into the food you eat. And yet you continue to eat it. Why? Because they do not think as you do. Because if you had to make a choice between creatures like them and creatures like yourself, you would choose to save those like yourself without any hesitation. But tell me then, what is the difference between those creatures and the so-called people of the colony, who scarcely possess one single shred
more intellect than other animals, who willfully deny the privilege of thought with every breath they take, who live off the minds of you and others like you who have provided them with everything they need to survive, devouring it all slowly and thoughtlessly, with the same blank stare as cows eating grass from the meadow?”
Samuel had no answer. He looked away from Leomedes and his eyes met Fia’s gaze, and in that one glance he realized she understood him instantly, knew him as well as she knew herself, because they were one and the same. And in that moment, Samuel knew he would never need to explain his innermost thoughts to her, that in her presence he would never be plagued by the constant haunting trepidation that she would not understand him, that no one would understand him, that he would always be alone.
And then he thought of Penny. Thought of her dark, shining eyes, eyes that shone from without, not from within, eyes that captured the whole world in their dark depths but seemed to hold no light of their own. Thought of the way her brow furrowed as he spoke to her, the way her face grew tighter and tighter in frustrated concentration as his voice rose with excitement. Thought of her soft, shy smile. Thought of the look on her face as she handed him her meal cake before she sadly ushered him out into the snow. Thought of their night walks together through the cool meadows of the colony. Thought of the first time they had spoken, and the last.
“I will not join you,” he said, very quietly at first.
Leomedes did not seem to hear him and took a short step forward, but then stopped as Samuel’s words reached him at last.
“What?” he asked, an edge in his voice. “What did you say?”
“I will not join you,” Samuel repeated, louder this time, his shoulders thrown back, neck taut, back rigid, arms relaxed at his sides.
No one spoke. Leomedes’ face drew tight for a moment and then a slow smirk began to creep back over his lips. Samuel turned on his heel and started for the tunnel behind him, his gaze passing once more over Fia’s. Their eyes met for just an instant, but Samuel thought he saw a look of understanding in them still. Then their bright copper gleam was gone, and he was walking down the dark passage out of the cavern. No one moved. No one made a sound. He was halfway through the tunnel when he heard Leomedes erupt into laughter behind him, the sound booming off the walls of the cavern and surrounding him in the passage. But still no one moved to stop him. No one followed him.
He emerged into the circular room with the video screens on the walls and the console below with all its buttons, switches and levers. He scanned the videos until he found one that showed the interior of one of the meal halls. A switch lay below the screen between two sets of pictures, one on the left with circles of many different sizes, the other on the right with several circles of equal size. The switch was set to the left, and Samuel flipped it back to the right. He took one more glance around the room, at the video monitors, the lights, the buttons, knowing full well his last action was futile, that anything that happened in their little colony could be undone by a simple flick of one of these switches. He could still hear Leomedes’ laughter ringing in his ears. He gathered his blankets, went to the door and opened it.
It was late morning. The sun shone brilliantly in the clear blue sky. He closed the door behind him and the laughter in his head died out. He gazed out across the wide and empty meadows. In the distance, he could make out the buildings of the colony. He shaded his eyes against the bright morning sun and began to walk.
XXVI
Samuel returned to the colony before the evening meal. The sun was low in the sky and sinking toward the mountains behind him, and his shadow raced ahead to touch the fence line before he reached it himself. He pulled himself wearily over the fence, and when he set foot on the other side, he stopped for a moment and waited. The dozen white halls rose up, polished and monolithic, above the velvet meadow. He could not even think of where he wanted to go. He rambled aimlessly, hoping to avoid anything that might remind him of everything he had given up by leaving the other colony behind.
Then he heard a shout from across the meadow. He turned and saw a figure in the distance, near the top of a hill. She ran down the slope, reached the bottom and sprinted toward him across the meadow, her arms and legs pumping smooth and straight, her feet skimming lightly over the grass. Samuel moved toward her, his stride quickening as he grew nearer. Penny leapt on top of him and he staggered backward as she threw her arms around him and hugged him even harder than when he had left.
She opened her mouth to speak, and Samuel expected the words to rush out of her all at once. But she swallowed and composed herself and said, “You came back.”
“Yes,” he said. “I told you I would.”
She flung her arms out to the meadow around them. “And you fixed it. Everything. At midday I went to pass out the meal cakes and they were all the same size. And the sky—”
“You passed out the meal cakes?” he asked. “This whole time?”
Her face brightened with pride. “Yes, of course. And at the midday meal today they were all the same size again, so I took the boxes away. But tell me everything. What happened to you?”
Samuel hesitated, not sure where to begin, not sure he wanted to begin. The sound of bells interrupted his thoughts.
“You must be hungry,” she said. “Let’s go eat.” And she linked her arm under his and began to pull him toward the nearest meal hall. “Let’s get our food and you can tell me what happened.”
They ate their evening meal together on top of a hill and watched the sun sink behind the mountains. Penny asked many questions, and Samuel answered them as briefly as he could. He felt numb and entranced, and his experiences of the past few days seemed to race too quickly through his mind for him to see them clearly. Or perhaps they moved too slowly, interminably slow, so that he could not recognize them for what they were, as a person looking at a sprouting seedling will not know it as a flower. Somewhere in the background Penny’s voice ran on and his own answered from time to time, and he saw the hand of the sun recede behind the black mountains, saw its bright fingers reach across the wide expanse of the meadow from the distant peaks to the hill where they sat in no time at all, then gently fall back to the mountains and fade behind them as the night rolled in.
* * *
They stayed up quite late that night, for Samuel did not feel at all tired, and when Penny’s eyelids began to flutter shut, they went to a sleeping hall and lay down in adjacent beds. She fell asleep at once, but he stayed awake the whole night, scarcely able to close his eyes. He rose as soon as the first rays of sun melted through the windows of the sleeping hall. Penny lay sound asleep in the next bed, her chest barely rising with her easy, measured breaths. He watched her for a moment, then stripped the sheets from his bed and carried them out into the meadow. He walked across the soft grass still damp with early morning dew to the greenhouse at the back of the nearest meal hall, found the concealed doorway and went inside.
Samuel fought to block out the low groans of distress from the cows in the cage to his left and went immediately to the rows of plants that occupied most of the room. Choosing four different rows, he removed one box of plants from each row. He spread the two bedsheets on the floor and placed two boxes in the middle of each sheet, then gathered the corners of the sheets and tied them together to form two bundles. He left them on the floor of the greenhouse and returned to the sleeping hall, sat on his empty bed and waited for Penny to wake. She stretched and yawned and grinned at him through half-closed eyes.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning.”
She lay in bed for a moment, luxuriating in the starchy sheets wrapped around her body. The sound of the bells drifted faintly through the windows of the hall.
“Are you hungry?” he asked. She yawned again and nodded, and they stood together and walked to the door. They went to the nearest meal hall, received their meal cakes, carried them outside and ate as they strolled through the meadow.
At last Sam
uel spoke. “Penny, if I left this place, today, now, would you come with me?”
She paused a moment and looked at him, as if trying to determine if he was serious. “Yes,” she said.
His gaze flashed toward the meadow beyond her as if distracted by something she could not see. “Finish your food,” he said, “and then we will go.”
Samuel led her to the greenhouse he had visited earlier that morning. The two sheets with the plants wrapped inside waited where he had left them. Samuel went to the cage, opened the door and allowed four cows to exit. He grabbed one of the bundles of plants and hoisted it over his shoulder. Penny did the same. Then he directed the four cows out into the meadow and closed the greenhouse door behind him.
Samuel and Penny led the cows out to the fence line where Samuel had removed the cross poles. They passed between two naked support posts and out into the meadow beyond the colony.
“Where are we going?” Penny asked.
Samuel raised his chin toward the open meadow. “Wherever we want.”
They turned to the right and walked across stiff green grass under a clean blue sky. The mid-morning sun cast their long shadows behind them. Samuel felt a tremor race through his body as the sun washed away the cool morning breeze. Looking to his side, he saw Penny’s eyes fixed straight ahead, the light full on her face. He gazed forward once more. The meadow before them was vast and untouched. There was nothing between them and the mountains in the distance, save a wide field of grass and a few scattered trees.
From the handwritten manuscript
“The Early History of the pearl colony”
In the year 2153, the scourge of cancer was eradicated from the face of Earth. A team of British oncologists led by Dr. Thomas Greene first developed a prototype cure for the host of diseases in 2089 by engineering an enzyme (later named epidermal growth factor receptor-mediated endonuclease III) to target cells that overexpressed the epidermal growth factor receptor, a trait common to metastasizing cancer cells. This synthetic enzyme selectively infiltrated the targeted cells and cleaved the cells’ DNA. Dr. Greene and his staff employed their treatment with abundant success in clinical trials on lung and breast cancer patients in the same year, and by 2091 modifications of the enzyme could be used in therapies against all forms of cancer. In 2096, the pharmaceutical company Omega Laboratories purchased the rights to Dr. Greene’s patented enzyme and began worldwide distribution of the drug under the trade name Neoplastase. Within fifteen years Omega could manufacture Neoplastase at such little cost that it could be sold at a profit to any hospital, pharmacy or health clinic in the world.