by Kaden, John
“Where you headed?”
“I thought you said you were taking us.”
“I am. But it’s not out there.” He waves them inside and disappears through the mudroom.
Jack holds Lia a minute longer, wishing for some easy way out of this mess, and feeling a despairing lack of solutions. They turn and move back inside, where Hargrove has rearranged all the furniture in the front room, shoving everything back along the walls. He stacks chairs in the corner and motions for Jack to help him lift the table. When the center of the floor is clear, Hargrove reaches down and peels up the corner of a matted old rug and pitches it aside.
Concealed beneath is a large square door with a rope handle. He lifts it back and lets it swing over and fall to the floor. A blast of dust swirls around the room.
“Careful,” he says, and lowers himself down a wooden ladder to an underground platform.
“You go,” says Lia, pushing Jack softly.
He peers down into the pitch-black cellar, then places his foot on the first rung and descends. Lia climbs down more slowly, her knee still aching, and Jack steadies her on the last couple steps. In the darkness, they hear metal grinding on metal and a thin ring of murky light opens along the floor.
“Give me a hand here, Jack.”
Together, they pull back the rusted circular hatch. Cool air drifts past his face and Jack fights a quick spell of vertigo as he looks down the vertical shaft, boring deep into the earth. The duct is lit with strange patches of murky white light. He searches for the source but sees no lanterns or torches—only dimly lit metal rungs receding downward for a great long ways. Hargrove lowers himself over the lip and starts clacking down the rungs.
Lia looks over the edge queasily and Jack peers up at her.
“Can you make it?”
“Catch me if I fall?”
He smiles and disappears through the portal. After a long descent they reach a wider, circular platform. Hargrove moves past it and continues on down the spiraling stairs. The light is coming from thin, milky panels set into the walls. Only a few of them still glow. Jack reaches up and touches one.
“You coming?” calls Hargrove.
They curve down the stairs and arrive just as he is turning a metal wheel and opening an upright hatch on the middle landing. The spiral stairs continue further down, seemingly forever.
“Did you build this?” Lia asks in astonishment.
“No,” laughs Hargrove. “I can barely keep it running.”
He steps through the hatch door. Flickering white light throws spectral illumination across the crescent-shaped room. It is dingy looking, with skeins of dried rust water crisscrossing the metal walls. Hargrove ushers them to a round window on the far side.
“Touch it,” he says.
Jack reaches out and places his hand on the glass, cold to the touch. It feels so good after the desert heat that he presses his face against it. Through the glass, he sees tall black columns arranged in formation, several stories high, blinking with scatterings of pinpoint light.
“What does this machine do?”
“It remembers.”
Lia steps forward and gazes down into the shaft, coursing her eye along the sleek black pillars.
“What does it remember?”
“Everything. From thousands of years back, all the way up until twenty-two thirty-seven. It’s all here. Everything we’ve ever known about the world and about ourselves is written inside of here. We keep these things. That’s our purpose.”
Nyla's footsteps wind down the stairs and she ducks through the portal.
“Hi. Denit decided to stay up top.”
Lia fixes on a framed portrait fastened above the window, showing a handsome young man with slicked back hair, peculiar clothes, and a mysterious smile. Etched on the frame is the name Ryan Hargrove.
“That doesn’t look like you,” she says.
“He would be my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather,” says Hargrove, counting out the greats with his thumb and fingertips. “He built this. Over two hundred and seventy years ago. Just before the collapse.”
They stand simply, looking up at the picture.
“Why?” asks Lia.
“He was a philanthropist.”
“What’s a filanothrist?”
“A powerful person who wants to do something good. He built this as a lifeline, after it became clear that the last days were near. Named for the city in old Egypt—the library. It’s a preservation effort. Built to last a thousand years. By the looks, it won’t last half that. Time gets everything, I guess.”
“So there’s writing in there?”
“There is. But not writing the way you and I are used to. It’s coded. Runs off electricity.”
Jack furrows his brow.
“I’ve heard of that,” says Lia. “It’s lightning.”
“Well, sort of. It has its own power source, but it’s failing. To fix it, I’d have to work with matter on the tiniest scales. I’ll stick with gardening.” Hargrove grins. “I fear we may be the last generation of keepers who truly understands what it is we’re keeping.”
Jack traces his fingers over the cold glass, a solemn look on his face. “I don’t understand.”
Hargrove flicks his eyes toward Nyla. “You want to know what happened to the world, Jack? Lia? Would you like to see what the collapse of a civilization looks like? Are those the answers you're looking for? Because I can show you…”
Jack turns to Lia. She nods meekly.
“Yes.”
“Come on, we’ve got to get something from below.”
They step back over the metal lip of the portal and descend more steps, the light turning darker as they travel lower. A chill in the air runs clean through to their bones and they start shivering. Lia rubs her thumb against Jack’s palm as they descend, round and round, lower and lower. A strange noise emanates from the depths, more felt than heard. Everything seems to be steadily vibrating. A solitary plink of water breaks the monotony of the hum.
Nyla bears down on another metal wheel, stuck in place with rust. Jack goes to help her and they jerk their body weight against it to dislodge the mechanism. It screeches slowly until the hatch pops free.
They enter a small dark chamber, sulking in dim red light. Another clear wall stands before them. Nyla feels her way along the corner to a near-empty shelf and reaches for a stack of zippered pouches.
“No,” says Hargrove, “it’s not needed. Nothing to contaminate anymore.”
He steps to the clear enclosure and produces a square key, which he inserts into a slot, and the first of two doors cracks open automatically. He proceeds to the next, and when it opens, a wave of air gushes out under pressure. By the thin red glow, Jack sees row after row of shelves stretching back into the darkness. They are empty, save for one. A solitary black case rests alone on the barren shelves and Hargrove takes it carefully into his hands.
“This is our last,” he says.
They leave the clear composite doors wide open and trudge up the tight spiral, back to the crescent chamber on the middle landing. Hargrove lays the black case on the floor. Beads of moisture form on its cool surface. He pulls a tab along the corner and peels a line from around its edges, unfastening the case, then folds it open and removes a clear panel with wires dangling off the sides. He carries it over to a small console, where a similar panel is already installed, and takes a few moments to switch them out, setting the old rigging off to the side and connecting the new in its place.
“Hope it works.”
“Here,” says Nyla, fetching two chairs, “have a seat.”
She feels along the edge of the console and lifts a thin black lid, exposing a jumble of buttons and controls. Hargrove positions himself before it, dancing his fingers over the console as if trying to remember the routine. Tentatively, he clicks a series of buttons and the screen flickers with blue light.
“Ah. There. Pull up your chairs, let’s see if I
can get this going.”
He enters more commands and the blue light becomes an image—a glorious city. Jack’s heart pounds as he looks on it. Tall glass towers, just as he’s been told.
“These are some of the last transmissions,” says Hargrove.
The image begins to move. The glorious city vaporizes in a fantastic ball of flame and the screen turns bright white. Changing patterns of light strobe across their drawn faces as they watch the horrors progress—a tiny apocalypse reflected in their eyes. More cities, felled by shockwaves of inferno. Violent hordes consumed with flame, their faces shriveling like burnt paper. Bodies so shrunken with hunger they look like ambulant skeletons. Armies of steel machines. Lia’s color drains from her trembling face. Jack is expressionless, void of emotion. A sudden wave of nausea rolls over him. Thomas was right—they never should have looked. Every image is worse than the last. There is no sense to it. Nothing to be gained. Every step they took through the cities of old, through those empty decaying streets, every step was a trespass on hallowed ground. All his fantasies about the old days seem so childish now.
“Make it stop,” he says.
Hargrove taps his console and the screen flickers to blue. He looks at them and says nothing. For a long moment they stare at the field of blue light, letting the slaughterous imagery fade from their retinas.
Nyla steps forward and places her hand on Lia’s trembling shoulder.
Lia breathes heavily and looks up to her. “Monsters…”
“It’s a lot to take in. I wish I could offer more in the way of answers,” says Hargrove. “I gave up trying to figure it out a long time ago. Decided there were better things to worry about.”
“How do you know it won’t happen again?” Jack asks numbly.
“It may well. History is full of savagery. No reason to think that’s the end of it.”
Jack rubs his knuckles in his eyes until a mosaic of expanding squares eclipses his vision.
“It’s not all bad,” says Nyla. “There are good things, too. Would you like to see?”
“What kinds of things?”
Hargrove touches the console and a crackling sound issues from the corner of the room.
“Bah,” he says.
He stands and bangs his fist against a perforated vent and beautiful music pours through it—a multitude of instruments never heard before in their lives, full of magnificent sound.
“This was written seven hundred years ago by a deaf man.”
He calls forth more images and the screen once again animates with a pageantry of brilliance. Hargrove begins in the early days and proceeds through the millennia with a quickness that bewilders his young audience, still of the forest at heart. They watch civilizations rise. They watch them fall. Yet through it all, and despite the failures and losses accrued through the centuries, what they see is a great ascension, a quest lasting thousands of years with no end point. The ache of destruction becomes a wistful thing next to the majesty of creation. These are the people Jack has dreamt of, in bright crisp attire, carrying on through streets of wonder with casual aplomb. They see the great works in their former pristine grandeur, before the scourge of Time wore them brittle and picked their bones clean. The whirlwind of visions comes to rest on a vast, barren red desert. Jack and Lia sit breathlessly on the edge of their seats, knowing at once that it is not the earth they see before them. An insectoid contraption with metal legs and a shiny exoskeleton settles itself on the surface of that red wasteland and two figures emerge wearing suits of silver, their heads encased by translucent globes. They bound airily across the alien vista, and they plant in the hard-packed redness the flag of a forgotten people.
The screen flashes to blue. The only sound is the steady thrum of subterranean machinery.
Hargrove rests his hands on his stout belly. He is beaming.
“A hundred years,” he says, “from the days of horse and buggy until the Age of great cities. We could lift ourselves out of this mess in a hundred years time. We have the force of knowledge behind us. We don’t have to wait centuries for new ways to be devised. We know the way. It’s all so simple, really.”
“How?” asks Jack. “Everything is gone. It’s all gone.”
“Oh, they had certain advantages that we don’t have. But the opposite is also true—we have a blueprint that they did not. Yes, their population was stronger. They had more established trade routes. Resources were plenty. We’ll have to power our work differently, but it can be done. Oh yes, Jack, it can be done.”
Hargrove smiles so brightly he seems at once more youthful than his two boggle-eyed visitors.
“A hundred years…” says Lia.
“A hundred years. When your grandchildren are as old as I, this world could be a very different place indeed. I’ve dreamt it my whole life. We have everything we need right here.”
“But your machine is breaking.”
“Let it break. Come on upstairs. I have something else to show you.”
He starts up and out of the crescent chamber and Jack snatches one last look at the sparkling pillars beyond the glass, barely able to comprehend the sheer volume of work contained therein. They climb to the upper landing and Hargrove opens the hatch he had bypassed earlier and they step inside. Black composite trunks are stacked floor to ceiling like coffins in a catacomb.
“Everything we need is here.”
He unlatches one of the trunks and creaks it open, revealing a silverwhite rectangular plate, so shiny it looks wet to the touch. With slow reverence he reaches inside and raises the plate, handling it as delicately as he might hold a butterfly.
“Platinum.”
Jack and Lia step close enough that their breath fogs its surface. It is engraved with minute writings on front and back, full of odd symbols that call back the dirt-written equation that Thomas had drawn by firelight.
“This tells of the movements of astral bodies, thousands of years worth of studies.” He hands it to Lia then lifts out another. “Here is the chemistry. Below that, more physics. More of the sciences in here. In this one lay the humanities,” he says, swatting the side of a high-stacked trunk. “Here, the engineering. And over here, more philosophy. It’s a scant collection, but it’s enough. The rough basics. You could build quite a society with the knowledge contained in these trunks.”
“Why do you keep them locked down here?” asks Lia. “Why don’t you share them?”
“We do. I have a small printing press. We run copies of the vitals, the things people need to live. The settlements we work with know we have something. But the full extent of it we keep hidden. It would be disastrous if it fell into the wrong hands. Such as this supposed King you speak of.”
“So Ethan and Renning…”
“Were spreading the word. Field work. We’ve done it for generations, since the downfall. For a long time not much happened. The die-off in the aftermath was terrible. Most people weren’t killed by war but by nature. Preventable deaths. Some of them we reached, most we did not. And records have been kept so that these last two hundred and seventy years aren’t lost to history. I’ve scrolls and ledgers from the earliest keepers here, the ones who lived down in this shaft until the poisons cleared from the air. Some are from the man I’m named after.”
“The man in the picture.”
“Exactly. Little by little, people came out of their hiding places and started to live again. Hasn’t been easy, though.”
A thought occurs to Jack. His own ancestors were there, surviving the terrors he and Lia have just beheld. They must have been, he thinks, or I wouldn’t be here. The notion sends a shiver down his spine, imagining some long-gone relatives of his, citizens of the tall glass cities, perhaps bearing some of the same familial traits as he, fighting their way through the horrific downfall. He thinks of the voice that rang in his head when he was locked in the pit, urging him forward, and imagines that they must have heard it too.
“Hargrove!” Denit’s voice echoes down the shaft.
/>
“Yeah?”
Denit shouts more words, garbled and incomprehensible. Hargrove sighs and sets the plate carefully in the black trunk.
“Time to get back up, anyway. Let’s see what he wants.”
He stows everything as it had been and they climb back through the narrow shaft, rung over rung, until they reach the cellar. Nyla stays behind to seal the hatch and the others go up the wooden ladder to the front room. Jack is last out—when he surfaces, he sees Denit and Hargrove leaving by the front door.
“What happened?” he asks Lia.
She shakes her head, then takes his hand and leads him outside. The men from the outpost line the edge of the porch, staring off at the horizon. Hargrove shuffles up and joins them. At first it appears they are looking at nothing, just the dark empty desert, but as they step closer the fires becomes visible, burning like a votive memorial on the far-off horizon.
“It’s them,” says Lia, tightening on Jack’s hand. “Where are we gonna run?”
He wishes he had a response.
Hargrove turns around, scratching his head, and addresses the gathering.
“Here’s your King’s army, now,” he says derisively. “I guess we’re leaving a little earlier than I thought—they’re not twenty miles off yet.”
Nyla steps out onto the porch and startles when she sees the fear in everyone’s eyes.
“Dad… what’s going on?”
“We’re leaving. Now. We’ll head north,” he says, turning his thumb toward the men. “You’ll ride south, down to Marikez. The plates are going with you. Tell Marikez to send everyone who’s able and willing to fight. We’ll chart his route.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the Temple," he says. "To kill the King.”
Chapter Seventeen
Their fires are so close Thomas can smell them. He huddles behind a spray of sagebrush, the pony curled beside him.
“Wake up, friend.”
The pony shifts and lows out a bovine moan. Its jowls are reared back, baring its teeth at Thomas.