2014 Campbellian Anthology

by Various

  I see armies of men marching through the streets. I see riots. Where are the aliens? When will they come?

  My shaking becomes too much and I slip from my captors’ hands. I fall forward, screaming. I curse the traitors for what they did. I weep out the details of what I’ve seen, my terror spewing into words. Then the hood is stripped off my face and the older man bends down, our noses almost touching, and cups my face.

  “Tell me everything.”

  The carnage in my head has too keen an edge for the dull words I give them. It is as if I want a bland description to somehow strip the images of their potency—of their reality. I hear my voice as if spoken by another. It’s a matter-of-fact voice, a voice that hoards syllables. “War. Father. Hate. Kill.” I see a war I cannot comprehend and I see my father with a look of sheer hate on his face. People are killing each other in the streets.

  “Astonishing,” the older man says, backing away. He has me raised to my feet.

  We are in a bunker of some sort. The ground is concrete rather than sand, though I never noticed the change. It is a squalid place but it is shelter. Despite myself, I feel relief for my captors. It is impossible to look at their sunburns and not be glad for shade.

  He waves the traitors away, and we are alone.

  “Your visions, boy—how often do they happen?”

  I square my shoulders. “I’m a Seer. I always have—”

  His plain, uncompromising stare thwarts my bravado.

  “Usually at night,” I say.

  “They’re increasing?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did you first see them?”

  “Two months ago.”

  “And do you also see what the other Seers see—visions of prosperity and peace?”

  “How do you know anything about the Seers?”

  He smiles. “You might say I used to be one. Anyone with a little foresight and a little honesty can be a seer. Sometimes such attributes get a man exiled to the desert.”

  I scoff at him. “When were you ever a Seer?”

  “Oh, young man, this world once had many Seers. They called themselves pundits, columnists, journalists, sociologists, politicians. Long names, little substance, liars all—”

  “My father is no liar! He is the head Seer of Almindor and a great—”

  The look of shock on the man’s face satisfies me. He fears my father.

  “Your father is Michael Odeilik?”

  Now the shock is mine. “How do you know my family name?”

  “Michael,” he says, shaking his head in wonder. He grins and closes his eyes like a Seer. “Then you must be… Thomas.”

  I flinch, reaching back for a wall that isn’t there. He steps into the space I occupied.

  “The son of Michael Odeilik. This is the greatest stroke of luck.”

  “What are you going to do to me?”

  “Don’t be afraid. Your father and I were once very close. Business associates, political leaders—friends. Did you ever hear the name Carl Drossan?”

  Just hearing his name gives me a jolt. I hear Drossan and think of the aliens. I hear Carl Drossan and think of something else. Like a key unlocking a door, I sway with the power of a new image. Once more it is my father and another man looking down at me. Both men are younger and so very tall, as if I look up at them from a child’s eyes.

  “So you recognize my name,” he says. “It was your father’s last savage kick, making me the villain of his ridiculous mythology.”

  “Mythology?” My voice is ragged.

  He grips my face in both hands again and stares into my eyes. “You and all the people who remain in the cities are programmed creatures. Your minds were conditioned to believe certain things. There are no aliens. There never were. The people of this planet need no outside force to devastate it.”

  The simple, sad tone of his voice creates a damnable trust, even though I know he’s deceiving me.

  The close proximity of the man’s face, the things he says, my confusions and doubts all combine to spark another vision. It’s as if a whole other world reveals itself and I slump to the ground in the man’s arms. He eases me down. I moan, ashamed when the tears come, the water for a raft of emotions that are childlike in their terror. It is an orphan’s fear, a pitiless and cold distress.

  The spires of Almindor look like stripped trees that have rained their leaves and their fruit down like bombs upon the people. The cities are at war with each other. The rioting is intensely personal, collective yet individual in its barbarity. My father shoves a woman onto the ground and begins to beat the man who was hiding behind her. Similar scenes happen everywhere, beyond my capacity to count. The men and women on the streets have purple faces. The clouds in the sky are purple with rain and lightening.

  How can all of this come to pass? What will happen to cause such hatred? How far in the future is this?

  I tell him what I see.

  “Don’t be afraid of it, Thomas. This is wonderful.”

  Appalled by his reaction, I try to push away. I lash out but my fists make glancing contact. “Only a traitor could love what I’ve seen!”

  “Love? That is not the right word at all. Remember is a better choice.”

  Staring at me with a blunt, unsparing expression, he begins to describe my visions in such detail that I shudder. He might as well be in my head. I look for a place to run again, but this time he’s ready and blocks the only exit.

  “The people of this world have built and ripped their culture apart in an endless cycle of anger, Thomas. Though our race must be thousands of years old, we have a mere seven hundred years worth of historical records that managed to survive our own barbarism. Our past is replete with civil wars, and the only thing we ever seemed to learn from them was how to wage a better one the next time around.”

  “I know nothing of this.”

  His brow furrows. “What do you know of the past?”

  I think, but very soon my thoughts blur. There’s just a haze when I try to recall anything that happened before the Drossan. I can’t even remember reading a schoolbook about it. In fact, I cannot remember ever being interested in who and what we were before the alien invasion.

  I look at him in puzzlement and shake my head.

  “It’s not your fault. You underwent the procedure, just like everyone else who remains in the cities and believe in the Seers.”

  I flinch at this. “What procedure?”

  “A mind wipe, if you will. It was rediscovered technology, you see. We are a far more advanced society today than at other points in our history; but at one point, eras ago, we could do things that were almost godlike. That period was lost to yet another wave of self-destruction. That fact depresses me the most. Even at our greatest, we were subsumed by our lowest instincts. The devices were discovered by an archaeologist. They were originally thought to treat mental disorders. Your father turned it into something quite different.”

  “My father?”

  Carl Drossan sighs. “We were on the verge of another collapse. Even in our known history, factions and partisanship had never been so extreme. With the technology we had developed on our own, this war might have wiped civilization. Your father and a small group of men in positions of power decided to use the rediscovered technology to save us. The plan was implemented in secret, over months, in medical facilities.”

  He tells me everything. How there was a legendary past when our people lived in extended peace, guided by Seers who foresaw the future and made the decisions necessary to sustain peace. Their word was law, for who could argue with people who knew the future? My father and many others obsessed over the idea of using the technology to make that legend real. People would have the belief put into their heads.

  Whether they wanted it or not.

  “And the traitors?”

  Carl Drossan chuckles. “To your father, a traitor is just anyone who disagrees with him. Yet he is a brilliant man in his own naïve, hypocritical way.”

 
; I grit my teeth. “My father isn’t a hypocrite.”

  “You don’t think he actually submitted to the procedure himself, do you? Oh, no. He and the Chief Seers of the other cities remember everything as it was. They keep themselves safely in the center of their scheme, trying to convince a civilization of wolves that they are actually sheep. Far from being a traitor, I was nearly his accomplice. Yes, I almost joined them, seduced by the idea of being one of the elect shepherds. But there was a price to pay, a price Michael Odeilik and the others did not find nearly as steep as I did. Families could not be spared. I didn’t have children, but I was married. I couldn’t sleep, thinking of my wife emptied out and filled with a false religion. That’s why I exposed the plan. By that time, though, its implementation was well under way. Only a few thousand from the various cities managed to join us in the wastelands. In revenge, your father made me the godfather of a mythical alien invasion, a little invention of his to justify the world’s sad state and explain our presence. And of course the hunting parties weed us out while channeling the native aggressions of the people.”

  “You expect me to accept this without evidence?”

  “Aren’t your resurfacing memories proof enough?”

  “No.”

  “You have Michael’s stubbornness. Come with me.”

  • • •

  He leads me to another room full of strange equipment. All of it looks old and weathered yet also otherworldly.

  “What is this? Did the aliens leave these things behind when we beat them?”

  For the first time, Carl Drossan looks angry with me. His face flushes red and he catches himself swearing.

  “Open your eyes, Thomas, and see. These are artifacts from a past civilization—our own.”

  I look around again. As I do, Carl Drossan picks up a black helmet and holds it out to me. I freeze, breathless. A new wave of images crowd my mind.

  “This is familiar to you?”

  I nod, almost sobbing. “Someone is placing it on my head.”

  “It is probably your father.”

  “A voice… a voice says it will only take a few minutes.”

  “Perhaps in your case it should have been left on a bit longer. Imagine how happy you would be if the procedure had worked properly. You would be home right now, standing in the temple with all of the other lesser Seers who, like you, were programmed to see and relay visions of goodness and light.”

  “But I’d be ignorant of the truth!”

  Carl Drossan steps closer, still holding the helmet in his hands. “So you do believe what I have told you?”

  I look down at my feet. “I thought I was… defective.”

  He laughs. “Unfortunately the only thing defective here is this device. A spy gave his life to get it to me, but it’s unfortunately broken.” Scowling, he takes the helmet and jams it onto his head. “If only it could operate!”

  “Why?”

  “I want to know exactly how the procedure works. If only I’d paid better attention when your father was explaining it. If only I’d listened.”

  “Then you’d know how to defeat it?”

  There’s a pause as he considers his answer. He sets the helmet down with a rueful smile. “Yes,” he says.

  • • •

  There’s talk about what to do with me. Some of Carl Drossan’s men want to keep me as a hostage. Others say holding a Seer is far too dangerous. I am not allowed to speak. In the end it is Drossan himself who decides my fate. I am to be returned to the place of the ambush. Drossan says he will take me there himself, alone. The many protests against this plan fail to sway him.

  We return to where his party attacked us. In the east the distant spires of Almindor shimmer like an illusion. The bodies of the hunting party remain scattered in the sand. Carrion feast on the remains with a lazy, selective hunger. Richter looks no less intimidating without his eyes. Carl Drossan grimaces at the sight of the corpses.

  “You’re not used to seeing death?” I say.

  “Oh, how patronizing you sound. How jaded and mature. I am quite used to death—and quite tired of it. Death has wearied me past your comprehension.”

  The tone of his voice becomes hollow and the muscles in his face slacken. Something inside of me, some flickering fire of loneliness responds to it like fuel.

  “Someone you love died.”

  His expression of surprise lasts only a moment. Then he smiles. “Perhaps you have more insight than you know, Thomas. The genuine ability to see into another’s heart is worth a thousand glimpses into the future. Yes, someone I loved died. My wife—four months ago.”

  “Was she… killed?”

  “It was a disease. There wasn’t the proper medicine to save her.”

  He began to shake before he finished speaking, and the last few words are almost lost in the depths of his sorrow. I reach out to him automatically, not knowing what else to do. We are alone with the dead and the memory of the dead, and I wish he hadn’t insisted on bringing me here unescorted. He seemed suddenly frail to me, as if he could not possibly survive in the wastelands by himself.

  “You should go back,” I say. “Every man and woman in Almindor would turn out if they thought a Seer was captured. They’d torture you in their outrage.”

  He laughs and shakes his head. “I suppose your insight only goes so far. Don’t you see that’s exactly what I want?”

  “Why?”

  “With my wife dead, I’m left with little to feel and even less to fight for.”

  “The truth isn’t enough?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “What about all the people back there in the desert who trust you to lead them? You’ll be betraying them if you surrender.”

  “Not surrender. Be captured.”

  “And you can live with that?”

  “But that’s just it, Thomas. I won’t live with any of this. The memory of the desert and my wife will be gone. The pain will be done.”

  I back away, stumbling over the body of a hunter. But I don’t fall. “You mean you want to go through the procedure now? You want the lie?”

  “I’m in such despair without my wife. She kept me going.”

  I shake my head in disbelief. “You called my father a hypocrite, but you’re the hypocrite!”

  “We all are in some way.”

  “And the broken device you have, that cost a man his life. All because you thought you could just put the helmet on your head as soon as you had it.”

  “But this way is better,” he says. “By capturing me, you get to return to Almindor a hero, a Seer beyond anyone’s question or doubt.”

  “Don’t act like you’re sacrificing yourself for me! What about the people back there in the wasteland? What will happen to them when they discover their leader secretly wanted the delusion all along?”

  “They won’t. I’ll be a martyr. I’m better off to them as a symbol.”

  “You’re a self-serving, deluded old man.”

  He laughs once again. “No, Thomas. I’m an old man who’s lived too long without delusions. I’m ready for their comfort now.”

  • • •

  Carl Drossan is right about the effect his capture has on my own reputation. I receive a hero’s welcome in every corner of Almindor. My father’s pride in me is eclipsed only by his evident thrill at having his former friend and adversary in his power. There is a private trial in the temple in which Carl Drossan is charged with being the primary conspirator with the aliens against our cities. Throughout it all I cannot help but study the faces of the other Seers, wondering how they do not in the slightest question the fact that this traitor and the aliens have the same name. It as if they are not hearing the same words I am. The one word we all agree on, in the end, is the fate we sentence to the man. Death. When it’s my turn to speak, I talk directly into the fire and don’t look at Drossan’s horror-struck face. It never occurred to him that my father would demand his execution. It never occurred to me either until the moment we al
l had to pronounce his sentence and I was trapped into being an accomplice in his murder.

  In the ensuing weeks, I function as best I can, no longer troubled by memories of the dark past. The present is black enough. In the mornings I am still a Seer of the Hunt. In the temple, I continue to lie with even greater skill and imagination. I see a long and glorious sunrise that scorches the land. I see terrific floods of cleansing rain.

  In the mirror, I see a coward. Sometimes I stare into my own eyes and relive my part in the trial of Carl Drossan. I keep thinking I’ll have the courage to say something different. But I say, “Death” every time.

  Then one morning, five months after the trial, a hooded man comes up to me and kneels as I pass near the temple. He grabs my hand and says, “Thank you, Seer, for your visions of prosperity. They give me and my wife so much hope!”

  The hood falls back. For a moment his face looks like Carl Drossan’s. But it is just some other old man possessed by the illusions Drossan wanted.

  The illusions I help spread.

  Staring at him, possessed by a meanness I should direct at myself, I say, “Your wife will die of disease.”

  The shadow of doom blights his face and he clutches my robes. “Please, Seer, please tell me you do not foresee such a tragedy for my beloved!”

  Crying, I jerk free of him. “What do you want to be told? That death does not exist? That sadness is a myth?”

  “But I have heard the Seers’ visions read aloud. The long sunshine—”

  I strike him. This single blow uncorks a torrent of violence and disgust within me. I kick and stomp him, wishing it could be Carl Drossan. Wishing, in a greater sense, it could be myself. I deserve no less for my duplicity.