Ever Winter

by Hackshaw, Peter

  “You know, though you’re a man-made thing, sometimes, the way you act is like a person.”

  “I was designed to—”

  “I know what you’re going to say. You’ve said that so many times. But you’ve changed since I met you. You learn, don’t you?”

  The robot blinked, which was something Henry had once asked it to do.

  “I have learned many things, and adapted.”

  Panthera stirred, but did not wake. His warmth was making Henry sweat.

  The man in the old film ate cubes of food that were pushed into his mouth at speed by a mechanical arm. It was funny. Henry laughed at the projection, feeling such relief at speaking his brother’s name out loud. It had set him free in that moment, of so much guilt and pain.

  “Hey, Hep. Do you think there are any other people scattered out there, like the ones in the Favela? If the Great-Greats survived in a Cano, then maybe in other parts of the world, some others did too.”

  Hepburn leaned in close. A human-like gesture.

  “I have a purpose which is closely aligned to healing, rehabilitating and, to some extent, protecting humans. It is why I exist. If humans do not survive, I shall still remain for a long time. I will not deteriorate as quickly as you would imagine. And so, I believe a human would call it, fear. I fear to exist with no purpose, knowing that I will simply be. I too would like to answer your question. To truly answer it.”

  “You’re afraid. To be alone. Just like me.”

  “It was never calculated when I was built, for there were so many humans. So many wars. I am to accept being outdated by more enhanced versions of myself. That is logical. In that event, I would be decommissioned. I would no longer be, and my purpose would have been served. But I cannot compute being dormant, simply idle, with no rationale, rusting and crumbling into dysfunction. It is a waste of my technology. Therefore, I cannot accept, to just exist with no possibility of humans. I am dedicated to humans. So, your question is my question. Even through my design and limited sentience, this is true. We both fear. We both fear endless isolation. We both need people. I have learned this, since I learned that an event happened on this planet which diminished man and womankind to near extinction. When your battle has concluded, if you would permit it, I would seek the answer to this question, because I cannot leave the question unanswered.”

  Henry thought about it some more before offering a response. “That’s the most you’ve ever said in one hit. You know, I’ve been harking about being alone for so long, but really, I haven’t been alone at all. If I’d truly been alone, I would’ve lost my mind. You have been there for me. You’ve been my friend.”

  “Thank you, Henry. I have taught you much. But you have also educated an android.”

  “I mean it. When the battle is done, you can go and find the answer, and if I survive, I might come with.”

  The man in the film was unable to keep up with the food being served to him, and the machine in the projection had malfunctioned. Two men in suits were trying to fix it; smoke billowed from it and the man was struggling with the corn on the cob that was assaulting his face.

  “I do hope you survive, Henry. It is an unlikely outcome, but one I prefer. For you, the battalion, Greater Britain, and also for myself. May you not die. But if you do, may it be instantaneous.”

  “Now that is moodlift!!” Henry quipped.

  Hepburn’s pixelated eyebrows raised in puzzlement.

  “I am glad that I was assigned to your unit, Henry. I believe there is indeed a friendship between us.”

  “There is, Hepburn, there surely is.”

  It began to snow. Panthera raised his head from Henry’s lap, annoyed at being woken. The snow penetrated the projected film and the man on the side of the hull was also being snowed upon. Henry didn’t want to cut the night short, assuming it would be his last, but he needed to sleep to have the sharpest mind he could prime as the bullets started flying.

  The projection ceased, but Canis Minor remained in the sky.

  Thirty-One

  The Rambling Man

  “I realize,” he said, “that I have done all the gabbing.”

  Mary had gotten so used to the deprivation of her sight that her other senses had intensified. Although the un-god had crept into the far corner of the chamber and not spoken for some time, she’d smelled him; his body soiled and foul from all the living and dead things that filled their world. Traces of earth and the strange mosses that grew, fed by moisture in the air and rare beads of water that breached cracks in the rock. The un-god was unwashed and unashamedly so. She supposed it had been overwhelming when she had first been confined in his volcanic lair, but she hadn’t been of sound mind for hundreds of daylights and all the many uncountable ones that had followed underground. Somehow, she’d found a peace in the quiet of the caves. She’d become whole again. One Mary. Still and silent, but present.

  She knew that her own body was smelling worse each day and that smell would, in time, meld with her companion’s, if it hadn’t already. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d bathed, or even washed in haste by hand. It was both puzzling and bemusing, because the realization came that she didn’t care. Who would judge her?

  She noticed the un-god’s breath. She heard him respire when he’d first entered the chamber and sensed that he’d tried to keep as silent as possible. Somehow, she could tell, from the other side of the dank space, that he’d eaten something just before entering the room, or brought it in with him. It wasn’t snake, centipede, or bat, which she’d eaten whilst barely alive. It was from the sea, or the waters that met it.

  “Maybe yourn absent manners. For I’ve fed you and you must’ve fathomed that I’ve no intention of plumping yourn ass to eat, by way of butchery or sacrifice.” The un-god paused for Mary’s reply and when none came, he continued. “I prefer the company. But alas, my girl, your company is shit.”

  She laughed. The first sound she had made in the longest of times. She placed her hands over her mouth in the darkness and took them away again. The un-god shuffled closer. Ten feet away. Five feet away. Closer still…

  “She squeaks, that shit girl.” He spoke as if he were addressing the insects in the cavern and not her. Somehow, in the dark, Mary could tell from the un-god’s voice that he was smiling as he spoke his words. She wondered then, as she had often, if he had a name.

  “I’ve sensed yourn battles. Sometimes you listen. Sometimes you don’t. And I’ve said over that you’re safe here. Maybe you heard that?” The nameless un-god shuffled closer. “I may look like a dead ‘un from the state of me, but I’m not your nightmare. Far from, si. And I’m no god, as you can tell. I’m just a man.”

  A comfortable silence.

  Mary took a short breath and readied her dry mouth. The un-god gave her all the time she needed to work up the courage to speak. “Why do you hide in the dark and let them think you a devil?” she asked finally. Her voice, unused for so long, sounded alien and frail.

  A droplet of water somewhere in the chamber fell from a height and made a din as it landed.

  “This is where the Great-Greats came to survive the start of this cold,” said the un-god. “My pa was one of them. Just a bairn, from no place he ever did recall. He lived here. Then out there for some time, then he came home, to the dark.”

  “Your father?” Mary replied, keen to grasp her proprietor’s story. Her voice was louder this time and sounded more like she remembered.

  “Maybe. I’m a hundred years old. I don’t know. But we lived here, quite happy in the heart and hearth of the volcano. Warm. Fed. Fishing deep rivers that flow underneath all of this. Boiling them fishes in the channels we made where the magma ran. We made light into this place from the fires of that magma. A few families, a couple of orphans and some friends.”

  “Families? Here?”

  Another droplet of water dropped peacefully from the ceiling to the floor behind Mary. A tranquil, inaudible suicide.

  “Come, follow,
” he said, and crept away from Mary to the place where he’d entered the room.

  Mary abided and crossed the room on all fours, sensing the un-god’s movements ahead. There, a narrow course took them away from the chamber and Mary, still sensing her confidante’s movements ahead of her, used her hands to guide her, at times catching webs in her hair and fingers and brushing insects off the sides of the passageway. The route twisted and turned. In places it felt like it had been dug out by tools. In others, it was the natural course of the inner caverns beneath the volcano. A draught swept a different kind of air into her nostrils, fresher than the stale, acrid stench of the chamber where she’d remained since her arrival. It was hard to keep up with the un-god, for he clearly knew the track well, yet he didn’t slow for the girl, who knocked and grazed her elbows, arms and feet regularly trying to keep up, losing her footing altogether on a couple of occasions. It seemed they’d trekked for half an hour and Mary tired, realizing she hadn’t moved much in her chamber since the un-god had first brought her there.

  Then there was a faint glow ahead. A tiny dot. A titchy sun.

  Mary pressed forward, and at the last turn, the passageway opened into a vast room adorned with pillars and columns of stalagmites. Here, she could see, for orange light fed the room from an entranceway on the far side. She shielded her eyes at first, finding it hard to look at.

  “The light comes from a deeper chamber where the magma swells. I never come here. Haven’t set foot down this part for an age. It’s a sorrowful place, but it was… Well, you should have seen it.” The un-god waved his arms in the air ardently. “We carved rooms and painted walls. We performed marvelous scraps of plays on the steps of our amphitheater and recited poems! Aeschylus, Ayckbourn, Euripides, Shakespeare, Du Bartas, Agbaje, Faber, Wilde, Wagner and Gupta! Artisans and teachers dwelt here, descendants of doctors and writers!” The un-god spoke passionately, then stopped to take a breath, changing his tone to a grave one. “All gone now. Cruel how that lot can be. Always the way. And I’m still here. Where it all began. And it serves a purpose.”

  Steps had been hewn into the rock. On one surface, the alphabet had been written in dye or ink of some kind. Beside it was written the phonic sounds for each letter, then basic sentences. One read ‘I started on time, but I arrived late.’

  There were drawings of yachts and vessels with people standing up on their decks, and of the volcano itself; a story told upon the rock. A backdrop of winter, illustrated by eloquently drawn snowflakes, followed them from sea to land. The waves themselves were portrayed to roll, then ice over. Dead creatures were depicted and a city of people, which Mary thought was to represent all of humankind, metamorphosed into a giant catacomb. She wondered if all that had been daubed and captured was the truest account of the apocalypse.

  “What does it serve? To stay here, or in the chambers, all alone in the dark?” Mary asked, a hint of challenge in her voice. She looked upon the un-god then; scaly skin. Skinny limbs. A potbelly hanging over a loincloth. There were a few singular strands of hair on his head, that had been miraculously untouched (from whatever had ruined him), or regrown. The un-god looked grotesque. Only he wasn’t.

  “One day, the king of the Favela at the time decided to end us. He could not stand the thought of people thriving outside of his control. Thought that in time we might rise up and overthrow him, or some nonsense. It was his fear. Not ours. It always is with tyrants.”

  Mary was intrigued. “Go on,” she said, still marveling at the cave around her.

  “I was deep in the volcano when all that was below me started to growl and rumble. It shook the rocks all around us and I thought the devil himself was going to rise up from the floor as it budged. But it was the magma that breached, and the scorching heat from it bubbled my skin and I reckoned it would cook me alive. It fizzed. Seemed to liquify. I screamed like nothing you’ve ever heard and I tore through the tunnels, rolling and bouncing off the walls aflame, until I reached the top where the bastards were cutting the last of our people. They had already heard my screams of course, echoing out to them with the very shifting and quaking of the volcano itself, but the fear in them when they beheld what had become of me was something else. Their eyes!”

  Mary spoke with kindness and empathy, saying simply, “You, poor man.”

  “I was a young man, and none from that Favela had seen fire beyond a blubber lamp.”

  “And they ran.”

  “They ran. Because I was their devil. Born on that day from such agony that most could not endure. My screams as I lay somewhere betwixt life and death kept them away for days, weeks. I’d rolled myself in the snow to quell the flames and numb my body, but it was no drug, or dram! Somehow, I crawled back into the guts of this place, tormented, damned; a Dante, for the new age!”

  Mary recalled the piled human skulls in the basin of the volcano. “But they came back.” Mary had moved closer to the un-god and found that she had taken his hand in hers. Unafraid.

  “Eventually. A few times, them early years. I would pick them off and make a mess of the bodies. I howled like a madman to keep them away from this place. I became a creature to scare the children with, not that they needed that out there.” The un-god squeezed Mary’s hand. His voice seemed to tremble at the touch of soft skin upon his malformed flesh.. “But I also became something else. A helper, in the dead hours, to those who needed it. This place is a sanctuary that none but the desolate and forlorn would dare enter. Those who have nothing more to fear than the Favela itself. Not many. Not many brave enough, or desperate enough. But, over the many years, a tiny few.”

  His eyes were bloodshot. Mary wondered if they could ever form tears, or if the heat of the magma had taken it from him.

  Mary looked at the painted figures on the walls and wondered if the un-god had been the one to help Mother and Father leave the Favela. She pondered the question, but it was the un-god that spoke first.

  “You said ‘What does it serve? To stay here alone in the dark?’ Well, I say that you, despite eating all the morsels I bring and succumbing to the nocturnal brilliance of this place and not trying to leave that chamber back there even once, I say that you still hold on to something in the world out there that you would feast your eyes upon. Something you’re not ready to give up for this place. The stars that dot the sky. The sun that would crisp my skin twice over. You just need to find your place in that light, or find it again.”

  Stars.

  “My place in the light? It’s not the Favela. It never was and never could be.”

  “But you have woken to yourn senses, shit girl. You have been all right for some time in here, I know. Just silent, making me do all the talking, like a rambling old man in a devil suit,” the un-god said. “But I should kick you out now, topside onto the icescape. Ain’t no company to me, anyhow.”

  Mary thought about sprinting across the icescape with a whalebone pick in her hand and the wind on her face. She remembered diving into the freezing waters and the shock that hit her when her body registered the freezing temperatures. The slingshot, the Ritual, the homestead. She thought of the exhilaration of being around other people. Of love, in all the forms that she knew of it.

  “I would go and see the stars. And find a place to live that I could call a home. And eat better food. But I would not do that knowing there is an ancient, rambling old devil slinking away in the tunnels of this hole. Now I know you exist and all that you have done for me in my grief that you know not about, I would wrap you in furs, so you do not crisp under the sun like fodder, and I would talk to you in the light until you finally shut up.”

  It was the un-god’s turn then to go quiet and think about what he might say next and all that had been said before.

  “But this is—”

  “This was. No, this is your home, but if you don’t want to leave it, there are orfins out there who would fill it with light and listen to you gabbing all day and night long. Why wait years for them to stumble down here to speak to a
demon? Go to them and be a good god. Save them from that place. Teach them all these things you know. All them Shakesheers, Guptees and Fables, whatever you harked. All they got out there is the knowing, that they could go under that ice and never return.

  “I know who you are. Who you really are,” Mary added, “Let’s go and see them Orfins. Now. I know of two that I would like to bring here.”

  The light that trickled into the room shifted and made the figures painted on the cavern walls come to life.

  “I liked it more when you were mostly shit and silent. You talk too much, mute girl,” the un-god replied.

  Thirty-Two

  Dream

  Henry found himself in the cavern where Martin had died. It was a perfect recreation of the room where the body of the young boy still lay under the ice. Yet in the dream, Martin wasn’t there. In his place, lay Father, wearing a pelt that Henry knew had been taken from him in his final hours and was being worn by another in the real world.

  Father opened his eyes and sat up, unfazed by the cold of the room in the dream, whereas Martin’s lips had once turned blue and his skin a porcelain color.

  There was brilliant light in this version of the cavern and it cast Henry’s shadow upon the wall. He looked behind him, but there was no torch, flame, nor fire. An orb of light simply hung in the room. An orb, that never was. Henry’s mind accepted it; a dream anomaly.

  “Henry-son,” spoke Father, pulling himself up into a sitting position. He looked healthy, with color on his cheeks and no signs of anything that had befallen him.

  “I miss you,” Henry replied. He felt how much he meant those words and he wanted to throw his arms around Father, but he knew it wasn’t really the man he had loved so deeply. He let the dream play out, seeing no point in challenging the journey his mind had set out.