Seeklight

by Kevin Wayne Jeter

  “Hello,” said a figure sitting in a straight-backed chair against the wall. “It’s Rennie, isn’t it? Who’s that with you?”

  As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Daenek could make out the old man, sitting with his vein-gnarled hands upon his knees. He was looking straight ahead but not at either of his visitors.

  “So they finally went out on you,” murmured Rennie, crouching down in front of the old man and looking into the dulled pupils of his eyes.

  “Well,” said the old man—his voice was flute-like with age, “they were never much good anyway.”

  “I’ve got a buddy here,” said Rennie, “who needs your help.”

  She placed a coin in his hand.

  The old man rubbed his thumb over the large gold-piece.

  “You’re doing pretty well, Rennie.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll be doing even better if you help me out. Can you do it?”

  “Let me see him.”

  Rennie pulled Daenek onto his knees beside her. The old man’s hands reached out and felt Daenek’s face, probing the flesh with sharp, bony fingers.

  “It’ll take a few days,” he said finally, putting his hands back on his knees.

  “That’s all right,” said Rennie. “We got time.”

  “Look at me,” the old man ordered Daenek.

  He peered into the age-seamed face, and then drew back in surprise as the features changed into that of a different man.

  Even in the dim light, the change was unmistakeable—the skin tautened, the arch of the nose changed its angle, the eyes seemed to shift position. It was not an old man making a face, but the visage of an entirely different person floating to the surface of the skin. Only pupils of the eyes, obscured with cataracts, remained the same. A few almost imperceptible shifts of flesh and another face appeared, like that of a smooth-complexioned woman.

  “The trouble with masks,” came the old man’s reedy voice, “is that you put them on from the outside. What’s best is a mask you draw up from inside. You’ll see.”

  They spent a week at the inn of the busker village, sleeping at night in one of the rooms upstairs. Daenek spent the days with the old man everyone called Uncle Goforth. Rennie stopped by the room at the end of the hallway at random intervals, then wandered off to get their meals or on other, more mysterious errands.

  “It’s the muscles,” explained Uncle Goforth on the first day. “And the sinews in the face. Even the bones flex a little. Everybody controls their own, but they just learn to make one face and then stop. Like learning to say one word, and then repeating it over and over for the rest of their lives. As though it were the only word they could ever say at all. But you can learn to speak with your face, make it say anything you want. That takes years. I’ll just teach you another couple of words, is all.”

  Daenek’s face soon arched with the pinching and kneading from the old man’s surprisingly strong fingers. Every inch of skin felt as if it had been stretched to its limits.

  There was a small wooden box as well, with jars of ointments that caused a furious itching or burning when rubbed on different parts of Daenek’s face. He could only make the uncomfortable sensations stop when he flexed the right muscles in the right way—muscles he hadn’t even known were there.

  The old man was finally satisfied with the results he saw with his hands. While Rennie was downstairs paying the innkeeper for their week’s lodging, Uncle Goforth stood beside Daenek as he gazed into a mirror on the wall of the little room. Daenek had stolen the stub of candle from the bracket in the hallway so that he could see what the old man needed no light to see.

  “Change this line first.” The old man ran his finger along Daenek’s jaw. “But slowly, so that no one will notice. Then the cheekbones—flatten them. That will bring the nose down as well, just a fraction. Change the eyes last. Pull the lids to the side and hold. Like that, yes. Slowly, though. Maybe nine months until you’re finished. That way you’ll become disguised without anyone being aware of it having happened. Check the mirror every time you awaken, until the muscles learn of themselves.”

  Daenek looked at the face in the mirror, the face that he would melt away and then grow back gradually aboard the caravan. It was that of someone else, rounded rather than lean, the relationship of eyes to nose to mouth different. He suddenly remembered how, as a child, he had stared at his reflected image in the pool in the rocks above the house. Looking for what the Lady Marche had said others could see in his face. Is it hidden now? he thought, studying the stranger’s mask. A wave of dismay that surprised him in its intensity curled inside him. Is it lost?

  Rennie came into the room. “Come on,” she said. “We’ve got to start back.” She held the straps of their packs in one hand.

  Daenek nodded, letting his facial muscles relax and his own features reform. He watched as Rennie gave Uncle Goforth some more money. In his own mind he was brooding, wishing they were already back aboard the caravan and moving again, towards that inevitable point where the past would reveal itself at last. He wondered if the time would come when his own face could say who he was, without shame or hiding.

  A steam whistle blew, its white plume feathering into the air from above the caravan’s bridge. Leaning against the guardrail, Daenek could feel the engines’ vibration increase. With a noise almost below his hearing the caravan shifted slightly as the power was transmitted to the treads beneath.

  “Two years,” he mused, resting his chin on his hands. Far below, the mertzer village began to slowly move away. The women and children stood clustered at the edge of the buildings, silently watching their husbands and fathers leaving. No one waved, either from the village or aboard the caravan.

  “Less than that,” said Rennie. She was leaning with her back against the rail, eating a fruit. She turned her head slightly and spat a seed out over the side. “We’ve been here six months already.”

  “It’s still a long time.” The faces at the village’s edge were receding faster as the caravan’s speed increased. Daenek had already begun to alter his own face, following Uncle Goforth’s instructions.

  “So learn some patience.” She tossed the core of the fruit over her shoulder. “It’s a virtue.”

  Chapter XIII

  It must be nearly a year now, thought Daenek, since the old man showed me how. He studied in the bathroom mirror the final alteration upon his face. The mask was complete now. His own had to be summoned with a conscious effort, so well practiced were the muscles. The face in the mirror was the one with which he awoke.

  He heard the door from the corridor open. Looking into their sleeping quarters, he saw Rennie gesture to him.

  “Hey,” she said, “come on topside. Wait ’til you see this village we’re at.”

  “What’s so special about it?” he said.

  “Just come on up and see it.”

  He followed her up the stairs and onto the deck. Nearly all the mertzers aboard the caravan were crowded together at the rail.

  After he and Rennie had jostled for a good position, it took a few seconds before he saw what the others were remarking upon.

  The village was deserted. Daenek gripped the deck’s guardrail and gazed down into the distance. Only a few scraps of debris, propelled by the wind, moved in the narrow streets. The wooden buildings sagged beneath their mantle of dust. In the tiny village square a wagon lay collapsed on its side, a wheelless spoke pointing up to the blank sky.

  “What did they used to do here?” said Daenek. He squinted into the sun’s overlay of glare.

  “How should I know?” Rennie leaned against the rail and spat. “Factory workers, I guess. Look over there.”

  Daenek followed the direction of her hand and saw the dark, rectangular shapes of the buildings massed at the far side of the village. For a moment he wondered what the villagers had produced inside their factory; then, which had given out first, the machines inside or the people tending them. Victims of time, he thought grimly.

  “Well, wh
at happens now?” Daenek looked around at the other mertzers clustered at the guardrail. The caravan had pulled up to the edge of the village only a few minutes ago. The sounds of the rest of the convoy could be heard in the distance as they slowly approached the former loading area.

  “What it means,” said one of the other men to one side of Daenek, “is less work for the cargo-handlers, that’s for sure.”

  Another man farther down the rail nodded. “We’ll just rest up for the night, and then be on our way to the next village. And the navigators can cross this one off their maps, just like the others that are this way.”

  “The others?” Daenek leaned over the rail and looked at the man who had spoken. “You mean there’s more villages than this one, where everyone’s just walked away?”

  “Well, sure.” The man looked around himself at the others who nodded in confirmation. “Seems like every run we make we always find at least one village where they all just packed it in. Gave it all up, that’s what they do. Up into the hills, digging up roots to eat, just like animals.”

  Daenek’s spine seemed to chill with a dismayed horror. Giving up, he thought. Not the fight to survive. But to stay human.

  He looked away from the mertzers at the guardrail and back towards the abandoned village. A group of three mertzers had emerged from among the shabby buildings and were returning to the caravan. One of them cupped his hands to his mouth. His shout was faint and smeared by the wind. “They’re all gone. There’s nothing here.”

  “Well,” said Rennie, pushing herself away from the rail. “Too bad for them, I guess.”

  Two other mechanics were covering the shift in the engine room that night. Daenek sat cross-legged on his bed, carefully rubbing with a wet cloth at the grease and dirt encrusted pages of the old book that Stepke had left behind so long ago. Slowly, so as not to damage the paper, he had over the last few weeks cleaned a dozen pages or so. The work was largely disappointing—most of the words remained illegible, and what he could read revealed nothing new to him. The book was some sort of history of interstellar travel, filled with dry technical information about the supraluminal drives that had been developed a century after the ancient seedships. Still, Daenek kept at it, staining his hands with the years’ accumulated dirt.

  He looked up from the book as a knock sounded at the door.

  On the other side of the screen that divided the room, he could hear Rennie roll onto her side and drop a coin or some other pilfered object with a dull click back into the little cloth bag in which she kept them. “Who’s that?” she said irritably.

  The grinning face of Mullon, the cargo handler, was revealed when Daenek pulled the door open. “Hey, come on,” he said. “A bunch of us are going prowling.”

  “Prowling?” Daenek looked at him in puzzlement.

  “Yeah, down in the village.”

  “What for?”

  “You know, just to kick around. See what they left behind.”

  Mullon jerked his head towards the stairwell at the end of the corridor. “Come on. We’re just going to slip over the side and look around, is all.”

  The thought of the empty buildings waiting silently in the night exerted a disquieting fascination on Daenek. Like bones, he thought. The remains of something dead.

  Before he could say anything, Rennie came up behind him.

  She was pulling on her leather jacket. “Yeah, let’s go on down,” she said, winking covertly at Daenek. “Maybe they did leave something— interesting behind.”

  Without answering, Daenek turned and pulled his own jacket from his footlocker.

  The short distance of roadway between the caravans and the village seemed faintly luminous in the moonlight. Daenek walked with his hands in his jacket pockets, not listening to the laughing conversations of the twelve or so others around him.

  When they reached the edge of the village, Rennie pulled Daenek away from the rest of the group. Hidden by the corner of one of the buildings, they watched the others disappear into the unlit maze of narrow streets.

  Daenek looked down and saw a small, dim point of red light glowing on Rennie’s palm. It was the seeklight. “Come on,” she said, closing her fist around the device. “We aren’t going to find anything by tagging along with that bunch.”

  He nodded and followed her along the side of the building.

  The enclosing walls of the squat wooden houses depressed him, bearing down on him like a weight. He began to wish that he were back aboard the caravan, away from these discarded husks and remnants of humanity, that blotted out the lower part of the night sky.

  Rennie came to the building’s door. She tried the handle, then kicked at the side of it with her boot. The rotted wood splintered and gave way.

  Inside, Daenek watched the seeklight’s small red point float around in the darkness like a disembodied eye. “Damn,” came Rennie’s voice. “Nothing down here. Where’s the stairs? Why’d I leave my flashlight on board?”

  Daenek stumbled into a table, knocking the chairs placed on it clattering to the floor. The building was evidently one of the village’s inns. Holding his hands before him, he cautiously threaded his way between more tables and at last came to one of the building’s walls. He groped along its surface until he came to a window too caked with dust to allow any of the dim moonlight into the room. The glass shattered out into the street with a blow from the nearest chair. “There it is.”

  In the faint light he could make out Rennie’s figure pointing to the stairway set agairtst the opposite wall. He crossed the room and followed her up the steps.

  The first room they explored upstairs contained, as far as they could tell without a light, nothing but a sagging bed and a small cabinet. Rennie poked through its drawers even though the seeklight had made no response when held in front of it.

  As she rummaged through the cabinet, Daenek slowly paced out the limits of the room, encountering only the musty-smelling tangle of old sheets and blankets in the center of the space. There were no windows in any of the walls.

  “Hey, what’s this?” Rennie’s voice broke the silence. “I think it’s some candles.” There were sounds of more rummaging around in the cabinet. “And some matches, too.” In a few seconds, the room was lit up by a yellow sphere of candlelight.

  Rennie lit another taper from the first and held it out to Daenek.

  He took it and watched as she bent down and examined the things she had already pulled from the cabinet and piled on the floor. Her candle dripped little dots of wax on the heap of ragged-looking clothing.

  “Junk,” stated Rennie in disgust, straightening back up. “No wonder they left it.”

  She strode out of the room and into the corridor. Daenek could hear the sound of her opening another of the doors further on.

  Kneeling beside the mound in front of the cabinet, Daenek poked through the old clothes as he held his own candle over them. He quickly saw that Rennie had been correct—they were little more than rags, tattered and frayed from age and wear.

  Whoever had worn the stained workshirt that he spread out on the floor had not been much larger than himself.

  And now he’s up in the hills somewhere, thought Daenek, running a hand over the threadbare fabric. No more factory, no more village—just simple hunger and cold, probably. Or maybe he’s dead already.

  Out in the night, past the noises of Rennie prowling in the other rooms, he could hear the distant shouts and laughter from the other mertzers who had sneaked off the caravan. Beyond that, though, was silence. Somewhere in the open spaces around the village, things that had spoken and moved like human beings, but now had not so much fallen as had let things fall from them, were sleeping huddled under the bushes and trees of the hills.

  How easy it would be, thought Daenek, gazing at the empty shirt. You wouldn’t even have to really die.

  He stood up from the pile of clothing and walked out of the room and into the hallway. Rennie emerged from the last door at the corridor’s far end. />
  “Nothing,” she said in disgust. She carried her candle gripped in her fist like a dagger as she strode towards hims. The seeklight in her other hand glowed its usual faint red. “It’d cut out, too, if I didn’t have anything more to keep me around than this junk.”

  “Maybe,” said Daenek, “they took it with them. Up into the hills.”

  “That’s stupid,” she snapped. “What use would they have for anything valuable?”

  Her anger made him smile despite the oppression the deserted village had created in his gut. “Very inconsiderate of them, all right, not to leave their money here just for you.”

  “Come on.” She brushed past him and headed for the stairs. “Let’s get out of here.”

  The other mertzers had broken into another inn further toward the village’s center. Unseen by them, the candles in their hands extinguished, Daenek and Rennie watched for a little while as the men tossed bottles out through the door and windows, smashing them in the street and against the opposite buildings. The smell of stale liquor and the sound of raucous laughter hung in the air.

  “What’s the point of that?” muttered Rennie. She turned and strode down another dark alley, away from the noise.

  Daenek thrust the dead candle into his jacket pocket and followed after her. At least she’s looking for something, too, he thought. Anything to keep moving. He watched her narrow-shaped outline walking a couple of meters ahead of him, the silhouette of her head turning every now and then to glance at the seeklight in her hand.

  A larger shape than the village’s low buildings finally loomed in front of them. Daenek gazed up at the factory, immense against the dark sky. Beside him, Rennie struck a match and re-lit the remaining half of her candle.

  The entrance, two wide metal doors, was directly at the head of the street they had followed from out of the village. A broken lock dangled from its hasp on one of the doors. When they had squeezed through the opening, Daenek took his candle from his jacket pocket and lit it from Rennie’s.

  The combined light from the candles seemed to barely reach beyond themselves in the factory’s vast interior. The edges of a few shapes, like cliffs or rock formations, towered at the yellow fringes of the light.