Immobility

by Brian Evenson

  They shook hands and then Rykte turned, went back inside.

  * * *

  HE STARTED WALKING toward the mountain, pistol in his pocket, knife in his boot, rifle slung over his back, carefully carrying the cooler in his arms. Is Rykte right? he wondered as he walked. Is it better for humanity to die out?

  He walked until he came to the end of a cul-de-sac, then simply walked past the house at the end of it, kicked a hole in an already-broken fence, and continued on through another former backyard, little more than dust now, to move around another house and come out in another circle, another cul-de-sac. He walked across it and through the remains of a house, using the smear of the sun and the mountains to guide him, to keep him heading east. Two more backyards, a shallow culvert between them, and he was on a larger street, this one running north-south. He hesitated a moment, considering cutting through backyards, but in the end followed the street north half a block and then took it east. Ruined cars, two of them next to each other, nearly scoured of paint but with enough left to tell that one had been red, the other green. Like Christmas, he thought absurdly, and was again amazed by what his mind remembered, and what it could not.

  It was a residential development, all houses, no apartments. The houses were single-story, brick ranch homes almost identical in appearance, scattered through with a smattering of bungalows and split-level ranches, the latter largely collapsed. The ranch houses, too, were often partly down or missing their roofs. He followed the road up a gentle slope until it curved north to end in a cul-de-sac. He pushed past a house and went east, climbing a steep slope that seemed to give way beneath him almost as fast as he progressed until, panting, he arrived at the top of a crumbling parking lot facing a derelict church.

  The front of the church had collapsed, the roof sloping down to touch the ground. He left the cooler on the pavement and climbed this roof, the structure creaking underneath him, until he had a view down to the lake and up toward the mountain. He carefully scanned the foothills until, finally, he saw the stadium, realized he was much farther south than he’d thought. He traced a tentative path through the streets with his eyes, then climbed down and started off again.

  * * *

  THE SUN, HE COULD SEE, was starting its descent, though it was still a few hours from setting. He passed through the remains of backyards, slowly traveling northeast now, stopping, when he had opportunity, to climb a brick wall or a roof and look again and reorient himself.

  He came to a river, its water still red, this one with a different sort of plant life running along the bottom of it, long and filamental and recoiling at the touch, almost more animal than plant. One or two water bugs, too, though more like underwater roaches than like the water striders he remembered watching when he was a child. He watched the tendril of a plant suddenly snap itself around one, suck it under. Yes, he thought, life was coming back, but it was coming back as something else, utterly unlike what it had been before. Another few decades, and perhaps it would no longer be a world humans could survive in. Chary of the plants in the water, he walked along the river until he found a place narrow enough to leap across.

  From there, he told himself, he would aim roughly for the place on the mountain where the letter had been; that would lead him directly across the university.

  It would have been simple. He would have done it, too, except after just a few blocks he caught a glimpse to the south of a large building, the sun glinting off it. It was, he could see even from here, an old town capitol, made of stone, pillars running along the front at regular intervals. Topping it was a metal dome. It reminded him of his dreams.

  He stopped and stared for a long time. What does it matter? he told himself. I dreamed about a dome, so what? That doesn’t mean it was this dome. I have a purpose, there is no point deviating from it.

  But when he started again, he was moving not toward the university but south, toward the dome.

  * * *

  WELL BEFORE HE ARRIVED, he looped the cooler over one shoulder by the handle, had the rifle out, the safety off. The building, he saw now that he was closer, had partly collapsed, one of the wings little more than a façade. But the middle section and the dome were still intact.

  He circled the building once, looking for signs of life. No signs of recent garbage, no plywood or metal sheets blocking the windows, nothing. Most of the windows were broken all or partly out and there were cracks in the walls, some of them big enough to push through. But he decided instead to climb the front steps, go directly in.

  The entrance hall was large and long, with a vaulted ceiling made of glass and steel, most of the glass gone now. It opened up into a grand rectangular room with the dome topping it, pendentives stretching down the walls to ground themselves in each corner. There were, just below the dome itself, on the vaulting of each of the pendentives, remnants of old murals, the images themselves little more than ghosts now. Here he could distinguish a human shape, there a bit of what must have been tree or mountain, but if there was a narrative to be read, he couldn’t follow it. The arches themselves were studded with stone, rows and rows of stone flowers carved into them. The dome itself was plastered on the inside and he could see remains of a mural there as well, bits of cloud and sky. Windows around the base of the dome gave light.

  A circle had been marked on the floor, a thin line of dark stone against the lighter stone, and another circle around it, and one more, this one in a lighter greenish stone cut through with darker lines, the whole of it vaguely giving Horkai the impression of a target. He circled around the circle but did not enter it.

  He felt the columns of the pendentives, but they weren’t sticky, no gluey gray substance. He looked up at the dome, scrutinized it carefully. Yes, there was something there—dark lines, streaks along the dome, cutting through the remains of the mural. But whether they were natural wear and tear or something else, he couldn’t tell. He stayed staring up at the dome, waiting for something to move, but nothing did.

  In the end, he passed under one of the arches and moved into the other part of the building. He climbed a mostly intact stairway and circled a stone balcony, having to leap across it in some places, not altogether sure how stable it was. A door marked SENATE CHAMBERS was half off its hinges, its handle stained with blood. He pushed through.

  The floor just inside the door was smeared with blood. Beyond that were collapsed desks and scattered chairs, as well as heaps of black phones. In the front, a dais, a larger desk on it. On it was a body.

  He moved carefully forward, rifle ready. The body was relatively recent, not the dessicated corpses he’d seen while traveling with the mules. It was naked. A stake had been hammered into its chest. It was extremely pale and hairless, just like him. He could not tell if it was a man or a woman; the facial features were ambiguous and the hips could have belonged either to a boyish girl or an effeminate man. It had what looked like the beginnings of breasts, but the body itself was chubby and the nipples looked more like those of a man than a woman. Between the legs there was no sex, neither male nor female, but instead what looked like series of a half dozen strings of pearls in a strange gelatinous casing that seemed to have been extruded from the flesh itself. He bent to get a closer look, but couldn’t figure their purpose. He was just reaching out to touch them when the creature opened one eye.

  He stumbled back, bringing the rifle up, and shot it in the temple. The head jerked to one side and blood began to drip as slow as tar from the hole, and then, even as he watched, the bleeding stopped and the hole turned opaque.

  Not dead after all, he thought. He stayed at a distance, wondering what he should do. Part of him—must be the human part, he thought—wanted to kill it, wanted to finish the task someone else had started. Another part, though, felt that, whatever it was, it should be given the same chance he himself had been given.

  He came close again, this time reached out and tried to tug the stake from the chest. He got it up only a little bit before realizing that the flesh ar
ound it had already begun to insinuate it, to make it part of itself. He let it go.

  Always remove the head, the human part of him thought.

  Before it could think anything else, he fled.

  * * *

  HE CUT BACK roughly the way he had come, passing through old yards now reduced to dirt and crossing through ruined fences. He couldn’t stop thinking about the creature, wondering what was wrong with it, why it seemed to have sprouted strange appendages in place of its sex. After a while, he had to stop and reorient himself, realized he’d gone too far.

  Back to the original purpose, he told himself. Focus, Horkai. He came to a surgery center, followed almost immediately by a sprawling medical center, which gave some evidence of being inhabited—nothing he could really put his finger on, just a feeling that things had been arranged, straightened up a little. He thought about exploring it, but in the end gave it a wide berth, thinking of what he’d seen in the town capitol.

  He saw a Mormon church, and then, almost immediately, little more than a block away, another one. He saw what must have been a soccer or baseball field—too hard to say now. Another field, all dirt and dust, this one with the cracked remnants of a track encircling it and a set of rotted wooden bleachers. A high school and, fairly close on it, additional fields: the start of the university.

  From there it was no time at all before he was standing near the ruined library pounding on the iron door, shouting Rasmus’s name.

  28

  IT WAS SOME TIME BEFORE the door swung open. When it did, it opened to a man in a baggy hazard suit, though of a thinner, less resistant sort than either the mules or the twins had had. When he saw who it was, the man immediately tried to close the door, but Horkai already had his foot in.

  “What is it?” asked the man nervously. Horkai could see through the faceplate that the man was thin, old. “What do you want?”

  “I need to see Rasmus,” said Horkai.

  “No,” said the man. “I’m sorry. You can’t come in.”

  “I’m here to report,” said Horkai. “I’ve come to report.”

  “No, I’m sorry, I already told you—”

  And that was as far as he got before Horkai butted him in the chest. The man went tumbling backwards, clattering down the steps, and Horkai was in, shutting the door behind him. He went down the steps quickly, stepping over the body of the man, who was groaning and beginning to struggle to get up. He wound down the stairwell to the room below.

  They were almost all there, almost the whole community, the whole hive, gathered in the common room at the bottom of the stairs, though they drew back as he came near, as if afraid to be touched by him. He came down to the last step and stood there, holding the cooler in his arms, waiting. It was only after a moment that he became conscious of how many of them were armed, of how many weapons were pointing at him.

  “Rasmus?” he shouted. “I’ve come to report.”

  The members of the crowd murmured briefly to one another and then fell silent. For a moment nothing happened. He was about to repeat himself when a door in the back of the room opened and out came Rasmus.

  He was flanked by Olaf and Oleg, their hoods off but the hazard suits still on.

  “You see,” said Olaf, when he saw Horkai. “We told you.”

  “And so you did,” said Rasmus. “Hello, Josef. I must admit we weren’t expecting you. And walking, too.”

  “I’ve come to report,” he said again.

  “A little late, aren’t you? We’d written you off as either dead or a turncoat quite some time ago.”

  “I have something for you,” said Horkai.

  “Oh?” said Rasmus. “And what might that be?”

  He shook the cooler. “This,” he said. He opened the cooler’s lid and tilted it so they could see the cylinder inside. “Mission accomplished.”

  Briefly Rasmus looked dumbfounded, his composure lost for the first time that Horkai could remember. But after a moment he gathered himself again, his face taking on its mask of benign indifference. Then he smiled.

  “Well done, Josef,” he said. “Why don’t you come into my office and we’ll talk about how best to reward you.”

  * * *

  IT WAS UNCANNILY LIKE HIS first visit to Rasmus’s office so many months before, the only difference being that instead of them easing him into a chair, he was on his feet and could walk to a chair and sit on his own. He instinctively took the chair he’d sat in before, the one behind the desk. Rasmus hesitated a moment, almost said something, then went to sit in the central chair of the three facing the desk, Oleg and Olaf flanking him.

  “Comfortable?” Rasmus asked, an edge to his voice.

  Horkai nodded. “Good enough for now,” he said.

  He sat there with the cooler on his lap, Rasmus staring expectantly at him.

  “Well?” he said. “You wanted to report. Go ahead and report.”

  “I have something for you,” said Horkai. “I’m going to give it to you and then I’ll consider our bargain complete. And then I want you to leave me alone.”

  “If it’s really what we want,” said Rasmus, “I imagine we might be able to accommodate you.”

  Horkai nodded once and put the cooler on the desk. He pushed it toward the trio of men until Rasmus bent forward and took it.

  He opened the cooler, looked at the cylinder again.

  “It wouldn’t survive unfrozen this long,” said Rasmus.

  “It’s been frozen,” said Horkai. “I’ve kept it frozen until now. Though it’s probably starting to thaw.”

  Rasmus reached out and prodded it, quickly yanked his finger away. He closed the lid, handed the cooler to Olaf, whispered in his ear. Olaf nodded sharply, then stood up and left, Oleg following him out.

  “They’ll handle it,” said Rasmus. “We’ll get to work immediately, make sure everything is in order. If it is, we can’t thank you enough.”

  “And if it’s not?”

  Rasmus shrugged. “Then we still have a problem. We’ll still need your help.”

  Horkai shook his head. “I’m done helping,” he said.

  “Oh?” said Rasmus. “Then why come back at all?”

  “To make a good-faith effort to finish what I agreed to do, to tell you that Qanik and Qatik were faithful to their purpose, and to warn you from now on to leave me alone.”

  Rasmus nodded. “You’ve been talking to that other one,” he said. “The one who won’t give his name. What sort of craziness has he been pumping into your head?”

  “It’s my decision,” said Horkai. “It’s not him, it’s me.”

  “Josef,” he said. “We found you. My father found you. We stored you for years, sometimes diverting power sorely needed for other things to keep you alive. Despite your difference, we made you part of our community—”

  “—your hive,” he interrupted.

  “Yes,” said Rasmus, “sometimes we call it a hive. What does that matter? What matters is that we took you in and looked out for you and made you one of us. And now you intend to leave us without repaying us for your kindness?”

  “Did that kindness include lying to me about an illness and then crippling me?”

  “I told you before, anything I knew about you, I had from my father. I only know what he told me, which was what you had told him. If you don’t believe it, that’s your business—you’re the only one who will suffer the consequences.”

  “Why did you lie to me about what was in the cylinder?”

  “I didn’t lie to you,” said Rasmus. “I told you as much as you needed to know, enough to make you do what, if you could think of yourself as a proper member of the community, you should have done in any case.”

  “I’m willing to bet that the cylinder was never stolen from you. That the only time this cylinder was ever stolen was when I stole it.”

  “I have dozens of lives on my hands to worry about. I have the continuation of a community to attend to, Josef. Even more than that: the continuati
on of a species. What does it matter, next to that, if you weren’t told things in a way that you could clearly understand them? What does it matter, next to that, if the factuality of certain things was, let us say, questionable?”

  “You’re a bastard,” said Horkai.

  “No need for name calling,” said Rasmus.

  “I’ve fulfilled my part of the bargain,” said Horkai. “Now I wash my hands of you.”

  “Let’s wait and see,” said Rasmus.

  “No,” said Horkai. “I’m leaving.” He stood and started for the door.

  “I still have something you want,” said Ramsus.

  Horkai stopped, his hand on the knob. “And what might that be?” he asked.

  “Knowledge,” said Rasmus. “Answers.”

  And perhaps, of everything, perhaps this was what Horkai regretted most. That upon hearing these words, he turned and returned to his seat instead of going out the door and up the stairs and leaving forever.

  29

  “ASK ME ANYTHING,” SAID RASMUS. “Anything you want. I’ll answer your questions honestly.”

  “Why should I believe you?” asked Horkai.

  “Because you don’t have any other choice,” said Rasmus. “The only person who possibly has answers to your questions is sitting here before you. Either you listen to him or you don’t.”

  Horkai hesitated, finally nodded. “All right,” he said. “What was I before the Kollaps?”

  “Truly? Nobody knows. My father found you, just as I said, dragged you to safety, nursed you back to health. You never spoke of who you were before or of what you’d done, but whether because then, as now, you had holes in your memory or because you simply didn’t want to talk about it, who can say? My father claimed that most everybody was like that in those early days. That everyone had lost enough that you knew better than to talk about it.”

  “There wasn’t anything with me when he found me?”