The Great Forgetting

by James Renner

  “I dunno,” said Nils, considering his gut.

  “You’re fine,” said Tony. “This thing can carry a ton.”

  Jack sat up front, too, with Sam in the middle. When they were all in, Tony waved his palm over the dash and the vehicle turned smoothly and then accelerated toward the nearest building, one of a hundred identical skyscrapers. They were heading directly toward a wall.

  “Don’t worry,” said Tony.

  Just as it seemed like they were about to crash, a door slid open and they were suddenly inside, moving along a marble hall that wound slowly upward around the perimeter of the tower.

  “Can you slow it down, please?” said Sam.

  Tony waved his hand again and the tram slagged a bit. Halfway up, it turned right, into a glass tunnel that connected to another building. In the next skyscraper, they passed through a wide, brightly lit expanse full of long desks behind which sat hundreds of Native Americans leaning over tall books. Jack saw that they were copying pages by hand. Nobody looked up to see them pass by.

  “Busy, busy, busy,” said Tony. “Sad little busy bees.”

  The next skyscraper was a giant indoor park. Oaks trees towered over them, fed by sunlight radiating through a ceiling of glass. A dozen Choctaw jogged along the edge of a lake. A family of Abenaki walked briskly toward the nearest exit. It was beautiful, but Jack noticed that no one was looking up at the trees or tossing rocks into the lake.

  In the next skyscraper, a room full of Onondaga worked an assembly line that spit out bound novels. After this, there was another writing lab, another park, and another bindery.

  “The whole city is basically a fractal,” explained Tony. “It’s all the same, really. Just more compressed the closer you get to the sphere. Nobody has more than anyone else. But what we have is a lot. We’re almost home.”

  The tram turned down one last tunnel and then slowed to a stop at a T-juncture lined with tall doors made to look like the entrances of Manhattan brownstones. A young white-skinned girl in overalls waited for them on the stoop of number 42. Her eyes grew wide when she saw Sam and her face broke into an unabashed smile. She made a sound like a mouse.

  “Sam,” said Tony, motioning to the girl, “this is Becky Cooper. She helps in my office. Brings me coffee, organizes my schedule. Smart cookie.”

  Becky leaped from the stairs and hugged Sam tight.

  “He talks about you, like, all the time,” Becky said.

  Jack put an arm around Sam.

  “I’m Jack,” he said. “Good to meet you, Becky.”

  “Well, this is awkward, right?” the girl announced, swaying on her feet. “Your husband disappears for five years and you fall in love with your high school crush again. That’s some Danielle Steel stuff, huh?”

  “Come on inside, guys,” said Tony, opening the door to his apartment. “Lots to talk about.”

  2 Becky’s story came first. While she boiled coffee on the electric stove in the kitchen, she spoke in a frenzy of words with barely any punctuation. Tony listened with a kind of older-brother pride.

  Becky’s mother was a scientist, she told them, a professor of anthropology at Miskatonic University in Massachusetts. She was published. Wrote long papers identifying subconscious Jungian archetypes hidden within pop culture. She became convinced that Led Zeppelin’s fourth album contained allusions to the mythical lost continent of Mu. That was the album with the strange symbols that supposedly represented the members of the band. The symbol Robert Plant picked, the circle with the aspen leaf in the center, was actually the ancient Mayan pictograph for Mu.

  “And she was right!” said Becky, filtering the coffee grounds through a sheer cloth. “She found it. Of course her helicopter crashed when the compass got all wonky near the island, killing the poor pilot, so she couldn’t ever go back. Not that she wanted to. She fell in love with my dad in Peshtigo. He’s just next door. You’ll meet him later, I’m sure.”

  “And your mother, too?” asked Sam.

  Becky kept her eyes down while she poured the coffee into ceramic mugs. “She died. Lung cancer. They have, what do you call it—chemo? They have chemo here, but it didn’t help. Not even their robots could make her better again. If she’d grown up on the vitamins here, maybe.”

  When Becky handed her a cup, Sam reached out and touched the side of her face, comfortingly. The girl smiled and, blinking, continued around the room.

  “I’m an apprentice shrink,” she said. “It’s pretty much the only thing they don’t have here. So Dr. Sanders is teaching me. I’m pretty much always at his office.”

  Tony led everyone to a sitting room with egalitarian furniture: a rocking chair, a cherry bench covered with a thick horsehair blanket. The walls were liquid-crystal screens that currently broadcast high-res video of the long plateau outside Peshtigo. It was as if they were having coffee outside, surrounded by nature. Tony went to a device on the wall, brushed his hand over it, and then the scene dissolved into wallpapering, the kind with those dark damask patterns.

  They all looked at him, waiting.

  “So,” said Tony finally. “Anybody have an idea about how we’re supposed to save the world?”

  * * *

  Cole sat on the stoop outside the fake brownstone and watched people come home from work. If he tried hard enough he could make himself believe that he was in Manhattan again. Gramercy Park.

  “It’s weird, isn’t it?” It was Becky. She sat on the step beside him and looked out at the people walking along the tunnels.

  “What’s weird?”

  “The truth. When you finally hear it, it’s never quite what you expect. It’s always a little worse and little better than you could have imagined.”

  He turned and looked through a narrow window at his friends inside. They were in the sitting room, arguing about what to do next. Jack was pacing, waving his hands excitedly.

  “We’re in what’s known as ‘section three,’” said Becky. “It’s where they put all the castaways, people who got lost on the sea and wound up on Mu. Or crashed here, like my mother. It’s not like they look down on us or anything. We just kind of like to stick together.”

  A brawny man was walking toward them. He had a thick gray cap of hair and looked to be about seventy, but he was still toned like a dockworker.

  “That’s my dad,” said Becky.

  They stood as he came near. He regarded Cole with a suspicious smile. “Who’s this?”

  “New people. From Dr. Sanders’s hometown.”

  “Cole Monroe,” Cole said. He held out his hand and the big guy took it, shaking it firmly.

  “Dan Cooper,” he said. “But all my friends call me D.B.”

  3 “Even if we managed to take down one relay,” said Tony, “nothing would change. The system is built with redundancy in case a relay is lost during a natural disaster. The relays crisscross the entire planet. There’s too many.”

  “So we take out a couple at the same time,” said Jack.

  “You’d need more than a couple.”

  “Why are you being so obtuse?” said Jack. “I thought you wanted to stop this.”

  “I do,” said Tony. “But we need time to come up with a better plan.”

  “You had three years,” the Captain said. “Wait. Five, right?”

  “How many times do I have to say I’m sorry?”

  “I don’t know,” the Captain said, his cheeks red. “A couple hundred more times seems like a good start.”

  Sam sat up. She had a mischievous look about her. A hunger. “Tell us more about the relays, Tony,” she said. “Where are they?”

  “All over the place. They’re hidden in plain sight, disguised inside landmarks and buildings. The Sears Tower, the Washington Monument. You’ll have to bring down the entire goddamn building to kill the relay, and how are you going to do that? You got a dozen sticks of dynamite somewhere?”

  Sam laughed wryly and sat back. “What’s it matter?” she said. “We can’t get off this island an
yway, right?”

  Tony cleared his throat. “Actually, that’s not entirely true.”

  4 On the floor below Tony’s apartment was a museum. Before she died, Becky’s mother had volunteered as a curator there. It was a retrospective history of the island from before the Great Forgetting. Becky and her father led the group through silent wings full of Mayan tablets and Egyptian sarcophagi toward the more modern section in the back. There, tucked into a corner like a sleeping bird, was a 1936 Lockheed Electra.

  “This was my wife’s favorite piece,” said D.B.

  “Ho-lee shit,” the Captain whispered.

  “Amelia Earhart,” said Becky. “She crashed on the beach in 1937. She and that man Noonan. They never left. She defended the island at the Battle of Mu when the Germans invaded in ’45. Single-handedly killed twenty SS officers before they got her. That’s why they put her statue out at the airfield. My mom’s idea.”

  Jack looked at his father. “Could it work?”

  “If the Germans kept petrol at the airfield, it’d be close enough to avgas to at least get to the mainland,” the Captain said. “If the Wasp engine is sound and can mix oxygen, still … Yes. Yes, this could work.”

  5 Sam awoke to the sound of her own voice and for a moment thought she was still dreaming. She lay beside Jack in one of Tony’s spare bedrooms, on an expansive mattress with silken sheets. The air was cool but the blankets were heavy and it had been the best sleep she’d had since Franklin Mills and all she wanted to do was sleep some more, but that voice filtering down the hall, just above perceptible levels … It sounded like her own.

  Quietly, she slipped out of bed and walked barefoot to the door. She opened it gently. Now that voice was louder and she could make out some of what was being said.

  You are beautiful, you know that? You make me happy.

  Sam brought a hand to her mouth. That voice coming from the front room was definitely her own. She was positive now, because she remembered saying those very words once. Was she dreaming? She must still be dreaming.

  Slowly, she walked toward the voice.

  Do I make you as happy as you make me?

  Yes. This voice was a man’s voice. Tony’s voice.

  She came around the corner and peered into the living room. Tony was asleep on the sofa. The walls around him played out a scene from their honeymoon. It was the hotel in Boston, by the aquarium. Sam saw herself, naked, lying across Tony’s chest, smiling down into his blue eyes.

  Tony shifted on the sofa, mumbled something, and the walls flickered a bit and then reset.

  You are beautiful, you know that? Sam on-screen said. “You make me happy.”

  It was a memory. The walls were replaying the memory Tony had fallen asleep to.

  After a minute, Sam put a blanket over Tony and returned to bed.

  6 Someone was shaking him awake. Jack opened his eyes. His father’s face was so close that he could smell the Scotch his old man had found in one of Tony’s cupboards. For a terrible moment, he flashed back to the house on SR 14 and believed his father was about to strangle him to death once and for all.

  “Johnny!” he said in a loud whisper.

  “What? What’s going on?”

  “I figured it out,” he said. “We can do it all. We can save ourselves. And we can save the whole motherfuckin’ world.”

  PART FIVE

  NIGHTMARE AT 20,000 FEET

  The worst aspect of our time is prejudice. In almost everything I’ve written, there is a thread of this—man’s seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.

  —ROD SERLING

  ONE

  ON THURSDAY, WE LEAVE FOR HOME

  1 There was blood on his hands, and for a moment Scopes couldn’t remember how it got there. He stumbled on his feet and then kneeled down and wiped the blood on the grass. He looked back over the Grimpen Mire. He thought maybe he wouldn’t come back this way again. He didn’t like it here.

  The Hound walked past the abandoned truck Nils had left behind and climbed into his Chrysler Turbine. When he turned the key, WKNY from Poughkeepsie was just finishing a test of the Emergency Alert System. Leaning out the window, he drove in reverse until he found the main road leading down Big Indian Mountain.

  He could hear his heart beating a rhythm of murder in his ears. What did I do? What did I do?

  * * *

  “You helped them!” Scopes shouted at the Maestro. He sat at the kitchen table, eating the man’s cold lasagna—which was, he had to admit, the best fucking lasagna he’d ever had. “Why are you helping them?”

  “I’m only giving them a choice.”

  Scopes swallowed another forkful. “Talking to you is impossible. It’s like a goddamn riddle talking to you.”

  “Riddles are the best kind of stories.”

  “I don’t understand your obsession with children’s stories and riddles and fairy tales. Josef never did, either.”

  “There is great truth in fairy tales,” the Maestro explained. “‘Hansel and Gretel,’ ‘The Three Little Pigs,’ ‘Goldilocks.’ They are stories we never forget. We feel them, the lessons beneath them. They are reminders to us about how to live. Don’t get lost in the woods. Don’t trespass. Treat other people the way you want to be treated.”

  Scopes grunted, looked at the new painting on the wall, the one that hadn’t been here the last time he’d bothered to visit. “What’s that?”

  “Do you like it? We painted it ourselves.”

  Scopes shrugged. “What is it?”

  “It’s an aspen leaf.”

  “So?”

  “You ever notice the little marks the humans put on their things? The little c in a circle on books and things?”

  “Yes.”

  “It means ‘copyright.’ It’s a reminder to them that the thing is their creation. That’s what the aspen leaf is. Whenever I rewrite a memory, I insert the aspen leaf into it so that I’ll know it’s a story I created. There are no real aspen trees. We invented them. If someone remembers seeing an aspen leaf, it means I’ve edited that memory for one reason or another.”

  “‘Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall,’” said Scopes.

  “Maybe.”

  “What are you doing with Jack?”

  “I’m just giving him a chance.”

  “We want the same thing. Don’t you know that we’re on the same damn team?”

  “No, we’re not,” said the Maestro. “You want to bring about the end. Help it along. Well, we think there’s another way.”

  There will be no freedom for you in their world, his mother, Ambala, had told him.

  “And if the world does remember everything?” said Scopes. “What will happen to us then? You and me? Have you thought of that?”

  The Maestro laughed.

  “What the fuck’s so funny?”

  “This is not our world, Scopes. It’s theirs.”

  “Goddamn it,” he said, standing up. “There should have been a place for us. The tribes got Mu. Why isn’t there a place for us?”

  “They forgot to give us one,” said the Maestro. “Like you, they were too busy thinking of themselves.”

  “Well, it’s not fucking fair.”

  “The world is not fair, Scopes. It’s indifferent.”

  “Stop calling me that. I hate that name! I hate it! It’s a joke. Don’t you think I know that?”

  “But we forgot your real name.”

  The Hound grabbed the knife from its place above the sink and sank it deep into the Maestro’s chest. The blade pierced the heart cleanly. “My name is Yohance!” he shouted.

  The Maestro collapsed to the floor.

  “You stupid monkey,” said the Maestro. “Who will update the algorithm now?”

  Scopes let the knife drop to the floor, his rage dissolving into shock. “You think we can’t learn?” he said. “I learned. I had forty years to learn. I know how the code works. I can reset the algorithm. I don’t need yo
u. You’re nothing special.”

  * * *

  There would be a place for the Hounds after the world burned, Scopes assured himself, shaking off the memory of the Maestro’s murder. He was nearly to Oneonta. He could see the lights in the distance.

  This was the only way to make the world a better place: let their greed destroy them and then start fresh. And that new world would need a strong leader.

  An emergency news report cut through the jazz playing on the radio. Scopes’s hair bristled. It was another school shooting. This time in Newtown, in an elementary school called Sandy Hook. See. They couldn’t wait to kill themselves. Why not help them along a little?

  2 On their sixth day on Mu, while they ate lunch—fresh tomatoes and greens—around a table situated on the tarmac of the Nazi airport, Jack noticed something about Sam. She had changed, a deep, elemental shift. She was radiant. She was a presence, persisting everywhere. She filled up the empty spaces with her voice and her laughter. It took Jack some time, but eventually he sussed it out. Sam was no longer afraid. He’d never known her to not be afraid of something. Kids at school. Her brother. Police. Human-ape hybrids. You know. Always something. But now. Now Sam held her own. And to say she was merely confident would be missing the point. It was more than that. There was grace in her being that belied the anger boiling deep down, and there was great beauty in that.

  He stood and offered his hand. “Come with me,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you.”

  “Is it about what Walter’s building in the hangar?”

  “Yes.”

  “He said we should meet him there after lunch,” said Sam.

  “We’ll only be a few minutes late. He can start without us.”

  Tony was waiting for them on a hover cart at the end of the runway. They climbed in behind him. Tony waved a hand over the dash and they were off. They shot past a row of German bunkers and into that old village they had spotted on the way to Peshtigo. Around a Tudor, half demolished by a fallen tree, the tram veered down an alley. The alley became a dirt road that led up a steep hill. Atop the hill sat a gigantic Colonial mansion in disrepair. The side that faced north was scraped free of paint. It was the color of storm clouds. Part of the roof had collapsed, leaving a gaping hole the size of a compact car.