by Sean Platt
“In all the past epochs, humanity has never been ‘innocent.’ There has always been evil.”
“And that’s why one of the Archetypes is the Villain,” Sadeem said.
“It is merely a construct. A way for the Mullah to imagine each epoch’s beginning.”
Sadeem nodded.
“This is consistent with our scan. But if it was a framework for your society, why did you keep it secret?”
If she was asking, the scan hadn’t been deductive enough to provide Sadeem’s real answer: That I never learned the details of the Legend Scroll and kept hoping they might be a kind of resistance against you. But even that had been absurd from the start. The Scroll was replete with words like “always” and “each time.” That alone meant that if the Archetypes had formed a resistance in past epochs, it hadn’t been especially effective.
So Sadeem gave an answer that was still true, even if not all the way: “I couldn’t just give you everything. Humans fight.”
He thought Eternity might balk — might say “irrelevant” a few more times. But instead she nodded in apparent acceptance.
“This does explain another anomaly we’ve discovered. It may even explain the Stranger we’ve discussed during your time here.”
“So you don’t know everything?”
“In each epoch, there has been an element of uncertainty. The Founders seeded it as an essential part of your species’ existence, but it has always been foreign to us. The intention was to create a variety of experience for our Watchers to study, beyond what happens in our purer consciousness. But doing so meant working with a tool that was useful on one hand, but dangerous on the other.”
“What element?”
“Your mind calls it chaos.”
“So what’s the anomaly?”
“Our intention was to recall all Astrals from the surface. But there’s one entity within our collective that we have been unable to recall. A soldier, in your words, who spent enough time with humanity to become infected. That one has not returned.”
Sadeem pondered Eternity’s words, feeling a strange kinship with this woman-who-wasn’t-a-woman — this force that had killed off all but a few tenths of a percent of his world’s people. In the moment, she was almost a person, like him. A being who’d faced a human sense of defeat, even if tiny. Something she didn’t understand, despite her best efforts.
“A Titan?” Sadeem said. “Or a Reptar?”
“A Transformed.”
“A … ?” The word clicked. “Wait. Are you talking about the second Meyer Dempsey? The one Clara called Kindred?”
She seemed distracted, head down: a parody of human pensiveness as if there was one brain in her one head. “But now, with your story of Archetypes, there is context. Because we can still feel our Transformed the way you can feel one of your fingers, and what’s there isn’t worse than defiant. It is black with infection. Perhaps it is right to stay behind. Not just to protect our collective but to seed your new humanity with evil, as your Villain.”
Sadeem found himself about to respond — perhaps to protest the idea of Astrals discarding their garbage with humanity — but she was right; it almost made sense. In the Eden myth, it wasn’t Adam or Eve who brought Original Sin — or its potential — to the Garden. It was the serpent.
Eternity looked up, and for perhaps the final time, Sadeem was struck with just how good at imitating humanity this inhuman thing had become.
“Then the issue is closed. Humanity has reached our intended seed number, and the land masses have been restored. The Forgetting is complete, and that seed shall start fresh.”
“They’ve forgotten everything?”
“Now that we’ve retracted our influence, their minds will stabilize. Only factual memory of the past has been erased. They will not remember their past wonders. They will not remember their old civilization or old cities or old ways. Once we have returned you to the surface and verified the Forgetting is complete from within our stream, our ships will leave your planet, and they will not remember us. But they will know each other. They will know how to build fires and shelters, how to hunt and work together, how to begin the next attempt at evolving their consciousness into one like ours. Perhaps humanity will be what it has the potential to become the next time we return.”
“And by ‘potential,’ you mean like you.”
“Humanity can evolve a collective like ours. It has nearly happened before.”
“Maybe we’re not supposed to be like you. Maybe, since you intentionally made us different, our ‘collective’ is supposed to be something else.”
“Perhaps.”
“When you send me back home, before you leave,” Sadeem said after a moment of silence, “will you make me forget, too?”
“Oh no,” Eternity replied. “Someone has to be the Sage.”
CHAPTER 51
Piper entered the small shelter, feeling an increasingly common sense of dislocation. It was almost like seeing something move in the corner of her eye then looking properly to discover that whatever she’d almost seen had jumped back into place after turning her head. Something wasn’t quite right, but she didn’t know what. Piper had the sense of her mind as a bathtub, plug pulled from the bottom and thoughts draining faster than she could turn on taps to refill it. A helpless situation — and even more, it felt inevitable. Maybe something was going very wrong, but it wasn’t anything she could stop. And it would be over soon.
She sat beside Lila, who had Clara on her lap. She was too big, but Lila had barely let the kid leave her grip — let alone her sight — since their reunion. Lila didn’t seem exactly eager to go through …
To go through …
Well, whatever peril they’d recently left behind them.
“Feeling okay?” Lila asked her, looking up. She was sitting in a chair made of metal and canvas. Not the kind of thing that could be easily made, the way cobblers in the square made things. So where had it come from? Piper couldn’t recall.
“Just kind of uneasy. I keep getting these weird … visions.”
Lila almost asked one question then obviously diverted to another. Piper wasn’t the only one having trouble articulating herself these days, and looking at Lila she seemed to remember a sense of visions meaning more than they did now. As if one of them had been a psychic or a fortune teller, seeing visions and reading other people’s thoughts on a regular basis.
“Visions of what?” Lila asked.
Piper looked down at Clara. “Clara, honey? Do you mind helping your grandpa with some stuff he’s doing outside?”
Lila’s grip on Clara’s arm tightened enough that the girl flinched. Then she let go a little, but Clara looked up at her, wincing.
“He’s right outside, Lila. It’s bright daylight, and you can see for miles.”
Lila still held Clara’s arm, reticent. But Piper was right. Nobody could snatch Clara without someone seeing or stopping it — especially not with Meyer and his brother watching her in the dooryard.
Lila turned to Clara, urged the girl out of her lap, and said, “Go ahead. Just be sure to stay with Grandpa and Kindred. Don’t go wandering off, okay?”
Clara rolled her eyes, but only a little. Then her mother beckoned for a hug, and Clara complied without comment. A moment later she was out the door, and Piper heard the strike of Meyer’s axe, the small clicking sounds as Clara stacked wood.
“What’s going on?” Lila asked.
“You’ll think I’m crazy.”
“I promise I won’t.”
“This is going to sound so stupid.”
“Just say it. I won’t laugh.” She smiled. “Or send you to the medic.”
Piper’s eyes darted around, her mind trying to cobble the interior mess into a cohesive whole. “Look. I feel like an idiot, but I keep thinking I see … ” She sighed. “Visitors?”
“From up the delta? From the desert?”
“From the sky.”
Lila laughed. “The Astrals.”
“So I’m not crazy?”
“Not about this, no,” Lila said, still smiling. “Have you talked to Stranger?”
Piper shook her head. “He’s so busy. Everyone is planting soon. Everything needs a blessing.”
“I did, not long ago. He said, ‘Thoughts of the Astrals are slippery.’”
“So he knows about them?”
Lila nodded. “He says they created us. They’re from the heavens, like the gods. But then he said they’re preparing to leave, as they have in the past. And that until they do, we’ll remember them a little … but once they’re gone, we won’t remember them at all. And for now, it’s like clinging to a dream.”
Piper tried to focus. She remembered personal details fine: She was Piper Dempsey; she lived in the fourth house to the far side of the square with her husband, his twin brother, their daughter, Lila, and her daughter, Clara. They spent most nights with their neighbor Peers and his dog, just sitting and talking. She knew she liked Peers but hadn’t always, though she now couldn’t remember what he’d done to offend her.
But when her thoughts turned to the alien ships in the sky — Peers called them chariots of the gods — it was like trying to recall something from her earliest years. Much of her history was similarly foggy, as if in flux. How had she and Meyer met? What had her pregnancy been like, and what of Lila’s first years? All those things might as well have been from a hundred years ago, from another life, from a whole other world. And the Astrals, as Lila called them, seemed to be tied up in all of it.
“How has Clara been?” Piper asked, deciding the topic was exhausted at best, frustratingly deadlocked at least.
“Good. But she’s strange, Piper.”
“Strange how?”
“She doesn’t talk much. She’s not as lively as she used to be.”
“It’s only been a week since she came home, Lila. Give her time.”
Lila’s mouth opened. Her head cocked.
“It’s been more than a week.”
“No, a week. I’ve been washing her shirts. One a day. Seven shirts.”
“I thought she came back months ago. Are you sure?”
“I’m sure, Lila,” Piper laughed. “Maybe you should go to the medic.”
But Lila was shaking her head. “She came back with Mara Jabari. The same time that Gatekeeper Carl and his clan joined the village.”
“Lila, I’m positive. One week.”
“But Carl, Mara, the others … the village wasn’t even built when they came!”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Lila. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we built the village in a single week and don’t remember.”
This time, Lila laughed.
“She’ll be okay. She’s a kid. Kids are resilient. Just let it pass. If she wants to talk about where they took her, let her. But if she doesn’t, don’t pry. She needs to move on, and so do you.”
Lila nodded.
But that night, Lila also brought a rock into her bedroom. She began to make marks on it, to count the days with a stick of chalk.
CHAPTER 52
And so life in the village continued.
The river gave them a ready supply of clean water, so they hauled buckets and used the water to drink and to bathe and to cook their meals over fires using pots that none of the citizens precisely remembered fabricating, purchasing, or trading for. They sat inside their homes (which, similarly, nobody really remembered building or even moving into) at dark, for protection, and wandered about during the day.
Sometimes wolves and coyotes came in the night, so villagers kept their food contained and their children inside and their small animals penned. Sometimes snakes made homes under their houses so they had to fish them out. The sun had a tendency to crisp the skin so they wore loose clothing or stayed in the shade when the sun was high. The land was fertile. And crops grew.
By the time the corn was knee-high, lapping up water from the river and laughing at the desolation of dry desert beyond the village, almost everyone had completely forgotten the strange visitors who’d come from the sky. There were nightmares, with black things that scuttled like bugs, purring with blue sparks in their throats. And sometimes, when a man as large as Carl came from the sun with his white covers on, those who saw his big, muscle-bound form would flinch until seeing that his skin was black, not powder white like the phantoms they remembered without recollection.
But for the most part nobody knew anything of the ships by then, or the catastrophe that had befallen them, or the old, distant cities, or the function of any of the strange relics people occasionally found in their belongings. When the villagers found such objects, they took them to Stranger, who pronounced them witchcraft, or to the strange desert-dwelling sage named Sadeem who made his home far away, in the hills, with a small tribe of disciples he called Mullah. Sometimes Stranger would make pronouncements about the relics, and often Sadeem told tales of a magic that once permeated the world like the very aether of existence, and how the shiny things — many of which came alive if you touched them — talked to that magic.
By the time two months had passed, the village was at peace. There were squabbles among the villagers, and the constant feud between Governor Dempsey and Liza Knight, who ran the rectory and seemed to know everything about everyone whether it was her business or not. But there were no outside enemies other than the wolves and coyotes and snakes, so life went on as well as it could.
The Dempsey family, which held esteem as the family of their fearless leader, was a mixed bunch, underpinning so much of the tribe’s day-to-day existence. There was Meyer, of course, who ran things when not bickering with Liza. There was his twin brother, Kindred, who was strange and distant and dark — a brooding, troubling figure who most knew to avoid. There was Piper, who acted as the First Lady and made clothing as her profession. There was Lila, who taught at the school. And lastly there was young Clara Dempsey, who spent much of her time with Stranger in his magician’s hut. It made Lila uneasy, but she permitted the friendship. Clara was different, and although Stranger was odd, he was trusted by the village and seemed to understand Clara — something Lila herself had given up on.
In Stranger’s hut, he and Clara discussed things they shouldn’t know but both did. Long after the Astrals were gone, Clara asked about them. Long after the ships had last graced the others’ memories, Clara and Stranger still whispered. And they spoke in hushed voices about Stranger himself, who struck Clara as instantly familiar in a way she didn’t entirely understand — and most often about Kindred, whom Stranger avoided like a plague. Many avoided Kindred, but with Stranger it was intentional — each steering clear of the other despite what both called “an intensely strong mutual attraction.” Whenever Clara spoke with Stranger or her grand uncle, the other man surfaced in conversation. Kindred wanted nothing more, it seemed, than to sit opposite Stranger for a meal. And Stranger, likewise, wanted nothing more than to visit with Kindred. Clara could feel their mutual pull, but for a reason neither would divulge they refused to meet — as if doing so was dangerous.
Stranger would say, “We all have our burdens to bear, Clara, just as you have the burden of knowledge and insight.” And Kindred, who knew less of Clara’s unique “insight,” would say the same. Kindred spoke of little but Stranger, using drink to still unknowable demons. Except that when he drank enough, another subject would surface. Lila heard this topic often, as the one tasked with shuttling Kindred to bed when his intoxication became too great and filled him with menace. He spoke of a woman named Heather, who seemed to haunt his past, but that Lila had never heard of.
In the mornings, Clara would often tell her mother that she was going to Stranger’s place then walk past it, headed to a place far in the hills — too far for anyone to walk alone. She could make it in two hours, most of that time spent crossing barren desert with no landmarks to guide her. Clara never got lost. She tuned inward to another kind of guidance, listening to whispers from her friends: a group someti
mes called the Unforgotten, but which called themselves Lightborn. Clara could hear them any time she chose to tune in, same as she could still see the strange network with all its nodes with her mind’s eye. When she walked, she called on the Lightborn to guide her, to the cave where she’d find Sadeem and the Mullah. But when she realized it wasn’t just the Lightborn offering directions from afar, she chose to ask the Sage, knowing he’d have answers to questions nobody else had — that nobody else could even understand.
“All the time I was on the vessel,” Clara told him, “I could see this network in my head expanding. And I could mentally tap each of the bright spots, which I kind of thought of as nodes. And when I did, I’d get a sense of what that node was: not just a spot in a grid but as a person. You were one. So was Piper. All of my Lightborn friends were in there, each appearing as a node in this big, expanding grid of people. At first I thought we were connecting, the way my mind plugs into the Lightborn. But it’s still there, even after everything! I think that’s how I can see my way through the desert: Millions of people saw this piece of land before the flood. Even with all the landmarks washed away, what they know — or knew — seems to have made me a map.”
Sadeem nodded, thinking. “It makes sense. Many tiny inputs from nodes on the grid, and your mind assembles them into a picture of the whole.”
“But they’ve forgotten, Sadeem! Nobody remembers the old world! Nobody even remembers the flood, the Astrals, none of it! My own mom doesn’t even remember her mom — she thinks Piper had her!”
“And?”
Clara looked at Sadeem with disbelief. He was sitting in front of her cross-legged, peaceful like a meditating yogi.
“And?” she repeated.
“Why would you expect it to be different? Just because they’ve forgotten doesn’t mean they don’t remember.”